A Note Of Gratitude And Appreciation

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It was a surprisingly exhilarating adventure packing up poster books and mailing them off to my readers. This was my first time ever physically interfacing with my audience in large numbers to any extent, and it was so beautiful going through everyone’s names and addresses and getting to send them all physical things that I could put my love into.

I made so many expensive rookie mistakes and had to solve a million problems figuring out how to do this thing that I’d never attempted before, but I loved every minute of it. It filled me with so much appreciation for all of you who’ve made it possible for me to do this weird, crazy job all these years and undertake these strange projects every so often.

After years of confining my expression to mostly online digital works it’s been so cool to take physical paintings that I made with my hands and turn them into books that I drove across town and picked up and packaged and sent off by hand, especially after all the freaky stuff that’s been happening with generative AI lately. I suspect were going to have to do things like this to stay in touch with our humanity going forward.

I enjoyed the humanness and physicality of it, even the stressful bits. I enjoyed getting way more orders than expected and having to scale up at the last minute. I enjoyed going to an actual, physical printer that made some of the books wonky after the printing took way longer than their website said. I enjoyed mistakenly weighing the books down with so much fancy packaging that I had to embrace the fact that this was to be mostly a labor of love once I saw how much the shipping cost.

I loved hand writing everyone little notes on postcards after all these years of typing. I loved seeing a name I recognized from online and taking a childlike delight in the fact that they live on an actual street in an actual apartment. I loved seeing all the different countries people come from; when everything’s in the spaceless environment of the internet you don’t really appreciate the fact that there are a bunch of people in places like Sweden or France connecting with your work. I loved visiting the post office twice a day with my carloads of packages and chatting with the workers about what I’m up to.

It was also such a fun thing to do with the family. Sitting around with Tim and my kids wrapping, writing, printing and packaging together while making jokes and listening to music for hours will be a memory I’ll always cherish. It’s just not the sort of thing we generally get to do together, and I loved it so, so much.

I don’t know if anyone even cares about this stuff, but this thing’s been such a big part of my world for days and days that I just wanted to share my thoughts and feelings about it. I am so unspeakably grateful to everyone who’s been helping me live the life I’ve been living since going crowdfunded in 2017, whether that’s by financial support or just reading and sharing my stuff. My life is so intertwined with yours, and I gained a new level of insight into what that means with this latest poster book adventure.

Anyway, yeah. Looks like everyone will be getting their orders before Christmas, unless I’ve made some egregious error I don’t yet know about. If you want to order a signed copy now I’ve still got a few left and I’ll get it to you ASAP, but if you live outside of Australia I can’t 100 percent guarantee it’ll be in your hands by Christmas.

Thank you all so very, very much for doing this thing with me. I really really love you guys.

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