Progress Update: T-Minus...

Hello and happy Tuesday, all you helpful humans!

I'll begin by saying that this week has been a vast improvement over the last several. I'll get into why deeper into the body of the post, but suffice to say that things are going to be far more positive this time around, which is a change we welcome.

I also wanna say before I get into it that I'm going to try and keep this one fairly short. I wanna save time, because provided I get enough work in this evening, the new video is either coming out tomorrow or the day after.

Where are we?

Major items on the list for this week:

• We tried our first public-access AMA last Friday, which was a blast! We'll definitely be doing more of them in the future. We just have to figure out the scheduling.
• We're perhaps a solid 12-14 hours of work from releasing this video (which is a relatively small amount of time considering how long the average video takes to make)!
• We're continuing to develop great relationships with the artists who work on the show and the merchandise. Our bookmark designer (Chris) is doing great work and making some awesome proposals—expect to see some of his process in the future as well! And things with Felipe are, as always, going swimmingly. He's an amazing asset to our team. We look forward to making him an "official" addition.
• We're dipping our toes into the waters of "Creator Culture" and having an amazing time of it.

I wanna pause and pay some special attention to that last one, there. If you fall us on social media (Tale Foundry, Me, Chloe), you may have seen already that we attended a Patreon Meetup in Chicago last Wednesday. We weren't expecting a whole lot from it. We thought maybe we'd have a nice, casual evening with some other creators doing some group exercises, learning about Patreon, etc., etc.

What it turned out to be was a major epiphany: it isn't that youtubers know youtubers, artists know artists, writers know writers, etc.. As it turns out, the simple love of creation and self-direction are enough to connect us. We met a lot of awesome people there, and looking forward to seeing more of them in the future. 

There are many voids to fill in one's life. You all have filled one of them, and now the concept of connecting to other creators purely through our shared love of creativity is beginning to fill the other. We just need to find more opportunities to meet up with people like us.

What's next?

We. Are. Releasing. A. Video.

Finally.

It's been forever. It feels like the universe has been assaulting us from all sides during this video's production, but now it's finally coming through. I can't express how excited I am to finally wake up from the nightmare this production cycle has been. I know Chloe's stoked too! Thanks for being so patient and supportive through all of it. <3

Additionally, we're looking forward to scheduling more public-access livechats, revising some patreon rewards (in particular, investigating the possibility of replacing custom avatars with an intro/outro show music download), and finding more opportunities to meet other creators (writing conventions are the big one that comes to mind)!

Anything else?

The Foundry itself won't be able to do much for Halloween, but everyone be ready for the awesome Coordinator team on our Discord server to host some seasonal events!

We've also just opened a channel for Inktober if you're participating!

Phew. I blew a longer wind than I intended there, but it's all good. Now that it's all been said, I think it's time I jumped back on this video!

T-minus [relatively small amount of time, probably between 24-48 hrs] to release!

—Benji