Sometimes I stress out about Inkblots. When you’ve been doing something for almost ten years, it becomes all too easy to start worrying about its perpetual economic unfeasibility, or its fluctuations in punctuality, and how you’re ever going to keep its quality on the rise, especially after you’ve had so many wonderful contributors in the past. Sometimes I stress out because each issue really is a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time, and sometimes I freak out because there’s so much that has to be done on any given issue. I have an OmniOutliner file that houses all my to-do stuff, and it’s a great, whopping, evilly-grinning devilbeast of a thing. You know the way the scrollbar in Mac OS X shrinks and grows depending on the magnitude of the field being scrolled? When I “expand all” on that outline, that scrollbar gets very, very tiny indeed. This is a daunting thing. Sometimes I consider throwing the whole thing over and moving to Aruba.
However, when I actually get down into the nitty-gritty of making a new issue, when I sift through the wonderful contributions, when I shoot a quick email to people whose work I admire and invite them to participate and they say “sure,” when sections start to gel and I can rub my hands together like Hannibal from The A-Team and chortle, “I love it when a plan comes together,” well, that’s when I know why I still do this after almost ten years. I love this stuff. And, Gods willing, I’ll be doing it for a long, long time to come.
Thanks, folks, for being a part of it.