I just took a look and the last time I updated this newsletter was March 2024. There’s a few reasons for this; I’ve been busy, my wife was being treated for cancer, and I didn’t really want to update a newsletter.
The Busy Stuff:
Hooo boy I got busy last year. When I put my pens back on sale early last year, the initial uptake was modest. Then it was busy, followed by a period where it consumed all my waking moments for 6 months. I have some insights into running an online retail business now:
2-5% of everyone that visits my store will buy something.1
3-5% of all orders sent will get lost somewhere in transit.2
Amazon’s next day delivery service has ruined people’s expectations.3
People are mostly very lovely.4
I’m anticipating that I’ll have pens back on sale in February, shipping from March onwards.5
Alongside running a pen business, I’ve been busy working on a few other things: I’m drawing a new book with David Gaffney, the third in our Grief Trilogy.6 It is published by Top Shelf and will be out when it’s done.
I’ve also been working as an editor for REDACTED, getting deep into artwork and storytelling with REDACTED, who is writing and drawing an ambitious book about REDACTED and how REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. This is a really interesting and enjoyable project because REDACTED is REDACTED, and this is REDACTED. I’d love to say more but REDACTED.7
I’m also back working with Superbrothers on REDACTED, which I am enjoying immensely. I worked at Superbrothers getting JETT: Given Time shipped, and I’m delighted to be asked back to work in my ‘Swiss army penknife’ capacity across a bunch of stuff.
The Other Busy Stuff:
Alongside the money-making ventures, I had a good year last year.8
I got to travel a little - I drove my car to Denmark and back, taught in Viborg (which was great) caught up with old friends (also great) was a guest at Copenhagen Comics (really great) and ended up unexpectedly camping on the shores of the Baltic on my return trip (Fantastic).
I’d driven to Denmark instead of flying because I was craving some adventure, and when there was a small mixup on the dates at the hotel in Copenhagen, I jumped at the chance to get in the car and let fate be my guide. I ended up camping in Aabenraa on the shores of the Baltic, and it was beautiful:
Just as I pulled up at the camp ground, my car started making a heckuva noise. Earlier in the trip, a truck in front of me started swerving about, revealing the wing mirror of another truck on the ground in the middle of my lane. With nowhere else to go without crashing, I drove right over the top of it and heard a small ‘tink’ from underneath the car. I thought I’d gotten away with it but on inspecting the car in Aabenraa, it turned out the heat shield above the exhaust had come adrift a bit and was clattering about making an awful noise at low speeds9.
A small distance into my drive the next day I pulled over and decided to fix it because while it wasn’t dangerous, the constant noise was annoying. With the car jacked up and me underneath it, a truck thundered past and the car shook in a way that made me wonder whether this was how I die, under a car in Northern Germany. I resolved to get home pronto and fix it there10, meaning that I cut my trip short by a day and missed a day of further adventures in The Netherlands. Ah well.
I spent a bunch of time in 2024 writing music too. I don’t tend to talk about this much. For no other reason than there’s no reason to. I don’t want to work as a musician, I don’t want to have another thing I enjoy burdened with the expectation of generating income or content11. Who is it for? Just me. If anyone else happens to enjoy it, great. But it’s just for me really. Here’s a playlist on Soundcloud. Someone asked me how I came up with the name Dante Berryweather and I had to explain that it’s just my name with extra bits clunked onto the end of each bit.12
I also took a swing at inlaying the headstock of one of my guitars with a fancy plastic called kirinite, and I think it turned out nice.
I ended up naming this guitar Skully (an SG model that I made from rescued parts) and I think it looks rad as heck.
In September, David Gaffney and I put on another Show N Tell event at the lakes festival in Bowness. It was great, and I’ll write about that in another post sometime soon. It was really fun, but I had to leave early to drive all night to get home in time to have some abdominal surgery13, which was less fun.
IRL Woes
Not much I want to say about this, but my wife was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. I alluded to it in the footnotes of previous newsletters14 and spoke a little about it online. As it stands, she’s doing well, we’re ok. It’s not really the kind of thing I feel much desire to talk about with strangers though15. End of section.
I didn’t want to write a newsletter.
A few months ago, I had a friend come to visit and we got the chance to hang out, take a road trip, play about in my workshop and it was a great time. Some of you probably even know them. I don’t think either of us put anything about it online, which was so refreshing. As people who have been cataloguing their creative and personal lives online for the past twenty years or so, having a sacred weekend that was for us and (frankly) not you16 was just great.
Maybe this sounds like I want to stop writing a newsletter, but I don’t. I just don’t want to feel like I have to spend my time trying to turn the fun things I like doing into an obligation to a platform that I know I’ll grow to resent. I know from experience that that’s no fun.
Until next time!17
Your pal, Dan
Aw heck, that’s a pretty dang good conversion rate!
Aw heck, that’s no fun.
I was struggling to do same month shipping at some points.
Apart from the ones that aren’t. Ughhhh they suck. I got nervous about badmouthing my precious customers, but I can’t lie. A tiny fraction of them just suck. They take up a disproportionate amount of my time and brain calories and leave a bad taste in my mouth.
This is reliant on:
Getting my GPSR stuff for EU sales just right. Dammit, Brexit! If you don’t know what GPSR is, congratulations on your perfect life, devoid of this kind of thing.
Knowing what the heck the looming transatlantic trade tariffs are, how they work and exactly how fucked we all probably are.
Not an official term for the trilogy. No matter how hard we try to make upbeat and fun books they always turn out to be about grief at the core.
I know, so mysterious!
Ughhh what am I saying?! It was my #1 most miserable and stressed year yet, and I say that as someone who worked in a British University for over a decade! Woooooof.
It was already a little corroded and this little bump must’ve just tipped it over into hanging off.
Which I did! While fixing the car I managed to slice a big chuck of the pad of my left middle finger right off, making the ground under the car look like a true crime podcast logo. This was not the most significant hand wound I would suffer in 2024. I’ll keep that for another time though. Needless to say, it was a gusher.
Pretty sick of the push to commodify all the things we do. The most poisonous words you can say in the English language are ‘you should start a YouTube channel’. Shudders.
If you are reading this, sound off in the comments what your recording artist name could be. It has to contain your full name but with extra bits on.
That’s right, I had surgery! All good now.
The footnotes are where I hide all the good stuff.
If you’ve been in a similar situation, maybe you’ve already experienced the craziness that sharing that kind of info online draws out of the woodwork.
Well, not YOU, specifically, but all the other ones for sure.
Whenever that is.
Honestly I get the dread of having to post online the stuff we get up to and monetize everything. Nonetheless, it’s great to hear what you’ve been up to whenever you have time to update here or on IG stories.
honestly love a sparsely updated newsletter, when they're too frequent i stop
reading them because there's too much reading to do across all of them!