MEOW!

Morning all!

So, update on all the things. Firstly, it's unlikely we’ll be able to get the big cat video done for Thursday this week, because we still need to film some additional stuff for it. The last video was quite lo-fi by our standards, so this one we want to be one of our big production jobs. All-singing, all-dancing, fully-nude.

Instead we’re going to do it as a premiere on Halloween itself next week (which rather conveniently falls on a Thursday), with us in the chat. You’ll still get it early though.

It’s supernatural-adjacent enough that it works outside of Halloween too, and the angle we’ve taken fits with our current obsessions. Also: yes… characters.

Howeverrrrrrr… we interviewed my good friend Jon Downes from the Centre For Fortean Zoology at the weekend (also, known to Found Footage viewers as The Boss of the Terrorists). He’ll be popping up in the main video, but we’ll get Patrons the full and fascinating video this week.

Jon is gloriously eccentric and a huge Digi fan from back in the day. We’ll also be doing a new Ask-Me-Do for you this week.

LIGHTWORKER 

If Digi has seemed a bit light over the past month or so… sorry. I’ve basically had an enormous amount of work on. For years now I’ve been trying to stick to office hours, but that has gone right out the window. My brain is a tad burnt-out – to the degree that I thought I was getting ill when we were filming on Friday, but it turned out that no… I was just utterly exhausted.

I'm not happy with all of my performance in it, because I'm more subdued than usual. My brain just wasn't firing at top speed.

Long story short: you may remember a difficult client I had on Fiverr at the start of the summer (ex-addict-turned-bodybuilder who wanted me to write his life story; understandably incensed that I was late for a meeting when my mum got rushed to hospital). I ended up cancelling the order and refunding him, but hadn’t reckoned on the impact this would have, or that Fiverr then penalises sellers for 60 days if they cancel.

In short: my work fell off a cliff… but then in early September it picked up again dramatically, and to cover the shortfall I basically had to say yes to everything I was offered.

This has been both good and bad. The good is that I have managed to make up the lost earnings, albeit at the expense of any free time or sanity. The bad is that I wasn’t choosy about who I worked with, and perhaps didn’t vet clients as well as I normally would. I get a vibe usually. For a start, I have a blanket rule not to work with clients who ask for discounts. They generally tend to be the difficult ones.

And so it has been.

I’ve one final job to get out of the way today, but it is, unfortunately, with another difficult buyer, who... I agreed to give a $300 discount to. He tells me he has no money due to the fact his only income comes from “selling weed”. He has sent me 50,000 words of sprawling drug-addled madness that he expects me to somehow condense into a coherent 5,000 words.

Oh, and the first draft apparently cut too much out so and didn’t mention the main character’s relationship with God – the key element of his idea apparently, despite the fact it WASN’T MENTIONED ANYWHERE IN THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT – so of course he hated it and I have to do it again.

What was priced at a two-hour job has turned into a multi-day job, but I daren’t risk cancelling it and getting hit by Fiverr again.

I don’t miss the stresses of the TV industry, but… yeah. It’s still a fricking tightrope. Thankfully, 90% of the people I work with are lovely and not mad and are able to string a coherent sentence together.

Sorry. Just needed to vent. I can’t vent at him, because then I’ll get a bad review, and that buggers up my gig rankings too. Bloody minefield.

Anyway, once that’s done I have a couple of weeks before my next deadlines loom into view, and the plan is to - firstly - visit the grandchildren, then - secondly - use that time to focus fully on all things Digi. I’m hoping the next few videos will be out in relatively quick succession.

That's it for now! Back to the coalface.

Paul