July/August 2019 update:
Oh [bleep], GenCon. This always manages to sneak up on me. I’m making an extended trip of it this year, visiting family in Austin beforehand, then staying a little while longer in Indianapolis afterwards. This means that if I don’t get your order out by Friday (July 26), I won’t be able to work on it for about two weeks. Overall, though, I’m still feeling pretty good about my orders and fulfillment. I’m a little backed up again, primarily because I made my Red Dragon Inn chests available again, and I had a few orders for fully assembled boxes come in. That doesn’t take too long, but whenever I do a fully assembled box, I find a handful of things that I want to change and improve in the design.
June 2019 update:
I’m finally caught up on my orders! For the first time in over two years, I believe, I have nobody waiting on me, nothing to ship out. (If you read that and thought “wait, what about my order?” definitely drop me a line.)
This doesn’t mean I’m immediately opening everything back up. While I have a moment to think, I want to go back through my products, get updated images and descriptions for most of them, and put together a plan for my older and less popular products, where I can still offer them, but communicate that they ship more slowly.
I also have GenCon coming up, so that takes up some of my attention.
Thanks to everyone for your patience!
April 2019 update:
The big news that I’ve been keeping quiet is that I’m getting married in April! Naturally, this has been on my mind for several months now, but as we approach the date – and the honeymoon afterwards – I have to accept that I’m just not going to get a whole lot of useful work done until late April.
After that, my schedule is relatively open until GenCon. We’ll see how much I can get done in those months!
March 2019 update:
Business first! I’m still working every day, making and shipping orders. Every order will be completed and shipped; there’s no risk of your orders being cancelled or of me disappearing. I might have to ask for a more-than-reasonable amount of patience, but you will receive your stuff.
I’m still falling behind on my queue, and I have a lot of big personal projects coming up in the next couple months, too. For orders placed in March or April, I would ask you to be prepared for a 3-4 month turnaround. Of course, I’m always working on bringing that down, but that’s realistically where I’m at.
I have opened up a few more products for sale again: Overlays for Terraforming Mars https://brightbearworkshop.com/product/overlay-for-terraforming-mars/ Dice Organizers and Screen Bases for Roll For the Galaxy https://brightbearworkshop.com/product/roll-phase-guide/ https://brightbearworkshop.com/product/roll-screen-base/ and some lovely overlays for Clans of Caledonia https://brightbearworkshop.com/product/overlay-for-clans-of-caledonia/
My next big project is to start making my Red Dragon Inn boxes again. https://brightbearworkshop.com/product/storage-chest-for-the-red-dragon-inn/ The design is pretty much complete, but each RDI box is so time-consuming that I can’t justify taking orders for those while I still have so many Eldritch Horror boxes to ship. I know that SlugFest Games will release some new product near GenCon, so I’d like to start taking orders for RDI boxes in July, and start shipping them in September.
I’d also like to see if I can easily convert my Eldritch Horror box into an Arkham Horror 2E box. That’s been a back-burner project for me, with the same issue: when I’m working every day on getting my existing orders made and shipped, there’s no real reason for me to be rolling out another big, complex project.
A friend recently shared an article with me, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work (For the moment, ignore the question of whether or not I’m a millennial; I was born in 1981, and it depends on who you ask.) Some of the early paragraphs in the article really describe how I’ve been feeling. “I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months.” “…when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better, I avoided it.” This is how I end up leaving an email unreplied-to for two weeks, or failing to get a shipping label on a box that’s packed up and ready to go for several days.
I certainly need to get a handle on myself and my motivation. It seems like an endless loop; I’ll relax and get my life sorted out as soon as I’m done with my immediate work, but I’ve been at least a month behind on my immediate work for over a year now, and burning out on it isn’t getting it done any faster. But, as I said in January, I’d like to avoid taking the store down completely. Ultimately, I do enjoy what I do, and I’ll keep at it!-
Barry
January 2019 update:
I’m the kind of person who starts projects with a lot of energy, but has difficulty completing them. And right now, my house, workshop, and online presence are filled with literally hundreds of tasks, big and small, that have all been weighing on me.
I don’t want to end up burning out, but I also don’t like the feeling of taking the store down completely, as I did last year. I do need some kind of income, after all. My plan is to reduce my product line dramatically, and only offer a few products that I can produce quickly, I’m happy with, and I feel are complete.
For January, those products are the Storage Trunk for Eldritch Horror, and my frames for Twilight Imperium 4th Edition.
As I have time, I’ll be reviewing additional products and putting those back in stock. From a business perspective, my focus needs to be on sustainability: determining which products are worth the effort to keep in stock, and improving my methods so that I can efficiently produce the maximum number of products and fulfill the maximum number of orders.
Thank you for your support and your patience! Although my work may stress my out at times, I always have to sit back and reflect that it’s a miracle that this has all worked out so far; getting fed up with office life, declaring that I’d rather just do it myself, and actually having a decent go of it. If I’m helping to make your game days better, I wouldn’t trade that for the world.
– Barry