Burnt 'n' Crispy

Hey everyone, I know it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. To be honest, I’ve felt burned out to a large extent on Second Life. When I got back from vacation, I had over 200 offline instant messages that had made their way into my email inbox. Who knows how many more didn’t make it! The great portion of those IMs were from people who had experienced problems with transactions while purchasing items, e.g. not all items were received or payment was made yet no items appeared in inventory, and so forth. The remainder were hellos, random questions, and the usual variety of IMs I get on a daily basis.

Dutifully and diligently I went through every last one of these IMs, giving everyone new copies of outfits or otherwise solving the problem while explaining the situation. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time, particularly when you have a conversation with a good number of those customers. I enjoy that very much, but it does add to the time it takes to get through everything.

I know it wasn’t just me suffering through SL’s myriad of issues, nonetheless, it does take it’s toll. My desire to log in after fixing all of these problems plummeted sharply, compounded by the fact that all of that typing brought back the tendonitis I had hoped to shed once and for all by avoiding computers for a few weeks while on vacation. In addition, the IMs kept piling up at an alarming rate even with me back.

Since that time, the problems have eased off to a degree and the transaction problems have been reduced to a trickle, and I miss so many of the friends I’ve made online. In light of that, my willingness to get back into SL has improved somewhat. However, I’m dealing with increased workloads in my real life job since some co-workers have quit and I have a major project I’m working on. This all conspires to keep me away.

I still think about designing and want to get back in the flow of things, but I don’t know if I can do it “casually”. Running an SL business is truly an undertaking and there is so much more to it than just whipping out designs. It’s a bit psychologically formidable for me to overcome that initial jump start that gets things rolling and into the groove. This is mostly committing to spend the time and to following through the cycle. It’s difficult. I am waiting until my desire to create tilts the balance away from my apathy and trepidation about the daily grind. I have lots of ideas for outfits and designs, but no willpower to open photoshop and begin the process.

Anyhow, I’m still here. I still think about SL. I still log in every few days to clear up my instant messages. I may not be ultra responsive, but I do get back to everyone (assuming I get the IM, which seems sketchy at best sometimes). I’m not going to make any promises right now, but I am fairly certain that I’ll be back to it at some point. Cheers.

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