In my defense, I was going to post Friday

Hello one and all,
By now, it seems that most of you have seen the letter in some fashion or another--I've received responses from about half the subscribers at this point, mainly positive response, which is a plus.
I was going to update Friday and got sidetracked by trivium--and I dearly wish I meant grammar, logic, and rhetoric. *ahem* Regardless, I found out we actually have access to Meisha-Merlin RAH's quickbook client lists! This simplifies things so very much so I've been spending a wee (not really) bit of time organizing our files so we've got full contact and subscription info on everybody. As painful as this is to do over a long stretch of time--physically, mentally, anthropomorphically--it's so very convenient to have a full break-down of everything on-hand in a single centralized location. I still hate doing it, though.
While it means we can't get the poster ready for Christmas, I've decided to let Donato take the time to work on the painting so it'll look nicer. I've also checked into it and we can get a special cut of the poster that'll be the exact right size without too much difference in the price.
Jeff Cook is going to take one last look through volumes 1-8 for us, which I certainly appreciate him taking the time to do. As for volumes 9 and 10, I'm personally uncomfortable with the state of The Past Through Tomorrow volumes as they stand. Rather than just tossing them forward, I've decided to send them through another round of proofing. I will be unabashedly--and probably undesirably--forthright and admit I'm feeling slightly tremulous at the moment; there've been rather a lot of comments about things that have gone wrong and I'm being a few steps more cautious than might normally be the case.
Fraser Sandercombe has been making icons to go on the spines of each of the books so they'll be more readily identifiable at a glance. They're rather nice; I'll upload them at the end of this. We've got two choices for Stranger in a Strange Land, so let me know which you prefer--I think the first one is better, personally.
I was going to update on Friday, but ended up consolidating our client info 'til 7 at night and decided to wait 'til this week. I'll be going to visit Family Friday-Sunday, Monday-Tuesday is Christmas and then, assuming I've managed to get everything into a simple, self-sustaining set-up, I very much plan to take two weeks off and be back around the 4th or so. Expect no real updates during that time period, though I will have access to my email if you have specific questions that desperately need answering.
I should be able to eke out the time to finish consolidating the subscriber info at which point I'm going to send out a mass e-mail (Don't worry, I'll BCC) just to double-check that they all work. If we've communicated via that email in the past, don't feel compelled to respond.

And now the pictures!

Edit: Okay, I can't actually upload PDFs--apparently!--so I'm going to see about getting jpegs or some such from the artist to upload.

Second Edit: Betsy asked if there was a way to contact me on the net. My work email is sean dot thompson at dula dot com.
I'm not entirely sure why the Meisha-Merlin website has *changed* to include credit card processing. I was under the impression that they were shutting down their site, but I'll check into that.
As for the new site, the new coding got patched up appropriately, I found the time to write the content, and at the moment Kevin Murphy is supposed to be updating it all and is turning it back over tomorrow. We purchased both virginiaedition.com and virginiaedition.net to host the site--as God is my witness, please, please, please do not visit those just yet. We've put up a flimsy shell of nothing but text so we can show it to the people we're getting our merchant account from. It is a hideous monstrosity and viewing it will yield nothing except unhappiness and lonely nights.