Stressful stuff...

As an artist people usually expect me to be messy and disorganized and I’m almost expected to miss my deadlines. Now I will be the first person to tell you I am messy, especially when I’m working, I regularly drive my husband crazy by leaving my stuff all around the house. But when it comes to my business as an artist I happen to be very organized and punctual. That’s why this whole book thing has been extremely stressful for me.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to do most of the work myself but unfortunately the production of a book is outside of my field of expertise, just a bit. This means that I have to work with a third party and that’s where the stress comes in. Because up until now I’ve had everything in hand, if something went wrong I would be able to do something about it right away. Now however, I have to wait for someone else to fix it for me. 

My book has been at the printer for almost a month now, I was nice and early and had all my files ready and checked. The first proof came back soon and that’’s when things started to get stressful. I wasn’t quite happy with the colours and the choice of paper so after some back and forth we decided to change the format an go for a 9”x9” hardcover instead. They would do some colour tests and everything would be perfect. 

A different format however, makes for a longer production time and with the colours not being that great I still felt like I needed another hard-copy proof to ensure the quality was up to par. I am still waiting for that proof, time is ticking away and the show is coming closer and closer. Now I’m not saying anything bad about the printer, they are working very hard to make the book the best it can be and I greatly appreciate that. But I’m not used to working with a third party and the waiting makes me all kinds of crazy. The fact that it’s out of my hands and there’s nothing I can do to speed up the process is very frustrating to me. 

I’m working hard to make sure that everything is ready before the show and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the book is going to make it in time. And even though there’s nothing I can do bout it, I’ll be stressing about it the entire time because that’s just the kind of person I am :)