No. 53 - Sunday Dispatch

Test Prints, Murderbot, How to Write a Children's Book is Old

Jun 29, 2025

Welcome to the Sunday Dispatch. Twice a month, I send a quick newsletter linking to posts I’ve written throughout the week on HelloThisIsBarbara.com and other places on the internet. I often share other things like what I’m working on, experiences I’ve had, etc.

If you don’t know who I am: Hello. I’m B.A. Burgess, author of some children’s books, creator of a children’s book course, and a complicated, curious person. For more info, consider reading the about page.

Test prints from Printify

Instagram used to be my favorite social media platform. I posted what I called a Daily Mug for years. Almost every day, I would take a picture of whatever coffee cup I was drinking out of.

There was a point in my life when I had a large collection of over 50 coffee mugs. After living in an RV and then moving into a small apartment, that coffee mug collection changed.

Now, my coffee mugs are a rotation of a few. Recently, I started adding my daily mug pictures to the note section of Substack since Substack is the only social media platform on which I post.

PSA: I am not on any other social media platform. This is it… for now. I'm open to change.

This morning, when I took a picture of my coffee mug, I included the two sample prints that I received yesterday from Printify. I wanted to run a test on the quality of their paper using monochrome photos and full-color photos.

The monochrome ones were delivered yesterday, and I'm expecting the full color ones on Monday. We have the matte textured paper on the left and the semi-gloss on the right. I'll be going over these two samples in the differences between them and more detail on my photography Substack if you're interested.

As I said, I'll go into more detail about the reason for getting these prints on my photography Substack, but the short of it is, I'm looking for a print-on-demand partner for larger, open edition works.

Murderbot

I genuinely don't like to spend my life in front of a television or in front of screens for that matter, but the nature of life currently is to be in front of screens for the majority of the day to earn a living, and also to relax.

So, to relax, I've been watching Murderbot on Apple TV. The good things about the show are also the bad parts of the show:

The episodes are short, and they are released weekly. This means a couple of things: good for your body, you're not sitting in front of the TV for extended periods of time; bad for your brain, the story is so good you want to spend more time than 20 minutes with each episode.

Good: The whole season wasn't dumped in one sitting, so you can’t binge it over the course of who knows how many hours. Bafd: Your brain will itch at the end of each episode due to cliffhangers.

10 out of 10. It’s worth every cliffhanger.

How to Write a Children’s Book is Old

My course, How to Write a Children's Book, is almost 8 years old. I had two new reviews for the course waiting for me in my inbox this morning, and I started to scroll back to all the other reviews, which led me to the upload date - November 2018.

I have spent these last eight years trying to decide if I wanted to still be known as a children's book author, but it doesn't matter what I want. The fact is I wrote four children's books, made coloring books, and had those children's books translated into other languages. I created a system for creating children's books and made the process easy for me, and then I shared that system of writing the books with the public in a course. It shouldn't be surprising to me or upsetting to me that some people in the world only know me as the children's book author.

There isn't anything wrong with being a children's book author, and I'm proud of the work that I did, but I don't like being pigeonholed. I don't like being just one thing, which is why this personal log is about everything that's going on, everything that I do, everything that I love, everything that I'm reading, everything.

But when I saw how old my children's book courses are, and when I see that it's still performing, meaning it's still helping people write their books with their own minds without the use of AI, I'm very proud of the work that I did. The system still works.

You can take the How to Write a Children's Book course on Skillshare, or you can read the How to Write a Children's Book book for free in the On Writing section of this blog.

It’s time to warm my coffee and do mundane but luxurious things like laundry and cleaning.

Be excellent to each other,

B.A. Burgess