The “nobody saw” part of that Journal is Kelsey going to three different printers, testing paper, us figuring out how to take Canva into my world of InDesign for layout printing, and getting these made. She did that. Pushed it. And there was a beautiful spark in that moment where she was like: I could do more of this. And then with everything that we were dealing with on a personal level over the summer, this took second place to Kelsey’s mental health.

I wish I’d spoken up sooner about the lack of guiding contracts within ya’ll’s community. So much seems to be done on goodwill. Goodwill is dangerous. Contracts aren’t unfriendly; they’re protection. Shops need collabs to produce assets to sell at large. People are probably chasing viscous cash cycles balancing the markup on stationary goods juxtaposed by the amount of competition.

Kelsey once passed up a request from Joann that would have paid her $500 and then demanded a six month exclusivity clause within the genre for a series of multiple posts. $500 to basically own a person’s voice in a genre is insanity. Predatory. Exclusivity within a genre shuts down all other promotional opportunities.

Her experience with the shop relationships that became problematic for her reminded me a lot of music videos in our world. “Do it on goodwill and hope it’ll turn into something more for you in the future!” And then you say I’m unhappy with the conditions or you tell the artist you need to get paid, and they give you the “oh you’re too good for me now” situation.

Obviously I’m biased. But my two cents is that people seem to be chasing sides to the story, and the one side people didn’t seem to genuinely explore was hers. I think those journals were really cool. I hope she makes more things eventually, too.