Edenglow Publishing, LLC - A Completely Normal Day at Edenglow Manor

A Completely Normal Day at Edenglow Manor

c. Edenglow Publishing, LLC ~ September 14, 2026

What does a normal workday look like when your job involves goblins, forgotten history, coloring books, strange music, and the occasional dead Victorian? Welcome to a completely ordinary day at Edenglow Manor.

People occasionally ask what I do all day. (Just last week a well-meaning friend suggested that I lounge around the house and play in the yard.)

This is a perfectly reasonable question with a surprisingly unreasonable answer.

I run Edenglow Publishing, which means that on any given Tuesday I might research a 600-year-old manuscript, design a coloring book about goblins, write a country song about a woman with a shovel, argue with an image that refuses to be the correct dimensions, check book sales, build a webpage, make a Pinterest pin, edit a YouTube video, answer a Facebook comment, and discover that somewhere along the way it has become 8:00 in the evening.

This is considered a normal workday at Edenglow Manor.

First, the Unromantic Part

Edenglow is a full-time job.

I spend roughly 40 hours a week working on it, and some weeks a lot more depending on how obsessive-compulsive I am that week and whether or not I can sleep. I don't say that because I think working ridiculous hours deserves a medal. It doesn't. It isn't necessarily healthy. But I say it because from the outside, creative businesses can look suspiciously like someone sitting around making pretty things whenever inspiration strikes.

That would be lovely.

In reality, inspiration is only about 10% of the operation. The other 90% is production, editing, researching, publishing, marketing, file management, website maintenance (ugh...), analytics, troubleshooting, and trying to find the tab I was working on five minutes ago.

There are an unreasonable amount of open tabs.

The Morning Census

Most days begin with numbers.

I check overnight activity: website visitors, YouTube views, new subscribers, Facebook activity, Pinterest traffic, book sales and whatever else has decided to move while I was asleep.

Sometimes nothing happened.

Sometimes someone in another country bought a coloring book in another language while I was sleeping, which remains one of the strangest and most delightful parts of doing this.

I look at what people are clicking, what they're ignoring, which books are selling, which songs are finding listeners and whether something I released months ago has suddenly awakened from the dead.

Edenglow has taught me that creative work develops a life of its own once you put it into the world. The thing you're excited about may sit quietly while something you nearly forgot existed wanders off and finds an audience.

So I pay attention.

Then I promptly ruin the tranquility by deciding to make something new.

The Making Part

This is the part people probably imagine when I tell them what I do.

And yes, there is a lot of making.

A coloring book might begin with something as simple as, What about pumpkin people?

That's enough.

Suddenly I need 50 illustrations. They need to belong together without being repetitive. Characters need consistency. The artwork has to reproduce properly. There are covers, title pages, copyright pages, descriptions, keywords, files and formatting.

One innocent thought can occupy several days.

Music is equally dangerous.

A phrase becomes a lyric. The lyric needs a sound. Then the song needs cover art, a video, a YouTube description, tags and a place on the website. Sometimes one song suggests another, and before long I have accidentally created an entire collection - which literally happened last night. (Steppe Thunder)

This happens more often than you'd think.

And then there are the Chronicles.

Researching forgotten history and folklore is one of my favorite rabbit holes. A peculiar old book, an abandoned tradition or some historical mystery catches my attention, and several hours later I know far more than any reasonable person needs to know about it.

Naturally, I consider this time well spent.

But then there is Snoopy-cat, Edenglow’s self-appointed Editor-in-Chief. As helpful as he may appear in photographs, his actual duties consist primarily of sleeping on whatever I need, walking across the keyboard, sitting directly in front of the screen, and demanding attention during moments of inconvenient concentration. Throughout the day he brings every toy in the house to my feet (hot sauce, squirrel, raccoon, mouse...) and yells at me until I acknowledge his gifts. And his editorial feedback is rarely constructive, but he works for pets and has never missed a day, so I keep him on staff.

Then Comes the Less Glamorous Making

Every creative thing eventually becomes a file.

Files need names.

Files need to go somewhere.

Books need uploading. Webpages need building. Links need checking (and rechecking). Images need resizing. Videos need assembling. Product descriptions need writing. Metadata needs entering. Occasionally a platform decides that something perfectly ordinary is unacceptable for reasons known only to itself.

And Canva and I sometimes have philosophical disagreements about where an object belongs on a page.

This is the part of running a creative business that doesn't photograph particularly well.

Nobody posts a dreamy photograph captioned:

Spent 45 minutes discovering why this link doesn't work.

But that is also life at Edenglow Manor.

The Manor Keeps Growing

One of the peculiarities of Edenglow is that nothing stays neatly in its assigned room.

A historical story inspires artwork.

Artwork inspires a jigsaw puzzle or an entire coloring book.

A coloring book inspires a song.

A song inspires a playlist.

The playlist needs its own corner of the website.

Someone leaves a comment that gives me another idea.

And suddenly we're building an entirely new wing onto the metaphorical Manor.

That interconnectedness is intentional now, although it absolutely did not start that way.

Edenglow has become less like a catalog of things I've made and more like a world those things inhabit together.

There are goblins here. Witches. Strange old books. Forgotten people. Circus performers. Cats. Cemeteries. Ancestors. Swamps. Gardens. Reindeer. Hippies. Creatures I didn't know existed until I made them.

Apparently there is plenty of room, and new doors keep appearing in the Manor. (I think there is an old movie about that...)

And Then There's the Business Part

At some point I have to stop making things and persuade other people to notice that I made them.

This is the hardest part.

I write Facebook posts. I make ads. I create Pinterest pins. I update the website. I watch analytics. I test different approaches. I try to understand why one post reaches hundreds of people while another apparently gets shown to a gentleman named Harold in Nebraska and nobody else - and Harold might hate it.

I celebrate tiny victories because small businesses are built out of tiny victories.

Every new follower matters.

Every book sale matters.

Every positive feedback matters.

Someone listening to a song all the way through matters.

Someone coming back to the website matters.

A stranger deciding that one of my strange little creations is worth bringing into their home matters -a lot.

The numbers aren't just numbers anymore when you realize there is an actual person on the other side of every one of them.

But, of course, putting things on the internet also means occasionally meeting people who seem personally offended that I made something and showed it to them. I don't argue with them. I hide the comment, block when appropriate, and get back to work. I do, however, keep screenshots of the especially spectacular ones for a public page that already exists but is currently in hiding on the website. Think of it as an archive of unsolicited criticism preserved for historical purposes. (The lesson is simple: if you don't want the internet to remember what an ass you were, perhaps don't be one in public.)

Eventually, Someone Mentions Dinner

Either the dog or the husband.

This is generally how I discover that the workday should probably end.

There is rarely a clean stopping point.

There is always another image I could make, another page I could improve, another song waiting, another article I want to research, another statistic to check, another entire list of ideas scribbled somewhere that suddenly seems extremely urgent.

So I save things.

I close some of the tabs.

Not all of them. Let's not get carried away.

And I leave Edenglow Manor for the evening.

Metaphorically, anyway, because ideas in my racing imagination keep me awake most nights.

The inconvenient thing about building an imaginary world for a living is that you never really leave it.

Tomorrow morning I'll come back, check the numbers, open the files and see what needs doing.

And somewhere between the first cup of tea and the end of the workday, I'll probably create something that didn't exist when I woke up.

That's a completely normal day at Edenglow Manor.

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