Hello world! I've spent most of the past two weeks hiding in a dark room pretending my head doesn't exist, so with the exception of Pretty Rocks Club, there's not a whole lot to report at the moment.

(I am... as okay as a person can be, two weeks into a hellish pain flare featuring nearly non-stop migraines. No advice, please; this is just a thing that happens sometimes and short of sending my kid to boarding school - are there boarding schools that offer law degrees to argumentative pre-teens who specialize in exploiting loopholes? - I'm already doing everything I can to get it under control.)

So, let's talk about Pretty Rocks Club! We're wrapping up year two, and I've decided to make a few changes - very few people were opting for the $45 deluxe level, and I needed to make some changes to the $25 regular level anyway, so after a bunch of pondering I ultimately decided to split the difference and go to just one level for $35, right in the middle both complexity- and price-wise.

(Want to see some examples of what that will look like? I thought you would, so I made a few sample pieces, using 2020 and 2021 materials so as to avoid spoilers but aiming for an approximation of what I'll be making in 2022.)

I struggled a lot with having to raise the price above $25, though, knowing that it would probably make some people unable to afford it, so I'm also switching to sliding scale pricing, no questions asked: if you can't afford $35, it is totally fine to pick one of the lower price points.  I really love doing this project, and it's important to me to keep it accessible to as many people as possible, and... there's a lot I want to say about why I believe that sliding scale pricing is an important element of social justice that I want to be able to incorporate into my business, but I can't brain well enough to articulate any of it at the moment. *headdesk*

Bottom line: every subscriber will get at least $35 worth of shinies + geekery every month. Doesn't matter how much you're actually paying, and honestly, even if everybody picks the $25 price point, the project as a whole will still be running in the black. People are more important than profit margins, and this is a thing I do that makes me happy and makes other people happy, and... look, if I end up spending a couple days a month making slightly less money per hour than normal, that is totally fine because I am still literally getting paid to play with pretty rocks and I don't even have to wear real pants. 

Signups for 2022 will be open through the end of December, and... y'all, I already have most of the materials and I am super excited to take you on this deep dive through the quartz family. THERE ARE THUNDER EGG BEADS! And some of the darkest rose quartz I've ever seen, and [redacted] with smoky quartz inclusions, and imperial jasper so stunning that I literally bought TWENTY-SIX STRANDS OF IT, and... yeah, this is definitely one of the best parts of my job.

...oh, and I will hopefully be doing the 2021 Necklace Of Doom sometime next week, so the giveaway for that will happen at some point this month.