Generally speaking, my readers are a patient bunch.

For the most part, this is because you are gracious individuals. Intellectuals. The Geek Glitterati.

Those rare few of you who aren’t patient by nature, have been forced to learn this virtue waiting for my books. This is a service I provide free of charge.

Because you’re all gracious, patient human beings, it’s only in these last few weeks that a few folks have sent a few polite e-mails asking if we’ve sent out the prizes for worldbuilders yet.

And now, I’m happy to say that we have.

(You might want to Embiggen this.)

From left to right, we have Maria, Joyce, and Nicole (sporting the new Greysdale Mead t-shirt).

Then there’s Me, Amanda and Kat. I’m easy to spot, as I’m the only boy.

Unseen but not unloved is Nate, who took the picture. And Brett, who happens to be roaming the earth right now, trying to collect all the pieces of the triforce. Or something. I honestly don’t know what he’s doing, but I suspect it’s something like a vacation.

And honestly? He deserves a vacation. Everyone here does. Without these lovely people, Worldbuilders wouldn’t have happened. I would have had a nervous breakdown and lit everything on fire sometime around December 18th.

Of course it goes without saying that without all of *you* Worldbuilders wouldn’t have happened either. So you all deserve vacations as well. Take one. And if anyone gives you grief about it, tell them I said it was okay.

I feel like I should point out that what you see in the picture above aren’t even all the packages. That’s just the final batch we sent out Tuesday.

I would have liked to get these prizes in the mail sooner. But…. well…. things got a little complicated this year.

You see, up until this year, Worldbuilders has been something I banged together on my own with a couple people helping out.

The first year Sarah helped me. The second year (2009), I had an assistant to lend a hand.

In 2010 & 2011, I had an assistant and a half, and some other friends helped with packaging, e-mail, some of the bookkeeping….

But I was still trying to run it all myself.

I hope it doesn’t disillusion y’all to learn that I am not a great organizer. Worldbuilders worked, but things were pretty chaotic behind the scenes. This didn’t particularly bother me, as I tend to gravitate toward Chaotic Good anyway…

But every year Worldbuilders got bigger. And every year there was more to do. And every year I was a little more overwhelmed.

So this year I brought in people to run the charity. Smart, lovely people. People who could organize things. People who liked to make spreadsheets. People to answer the e-mail and run the store. People to package and talk to donors and take pictures and help me put together the blogs.

And I learned two things:

1. It’s awesome having enough help.

2. It takes a lot of time do things the right way.

We’ve got an inventory system now where we scan in books with a bar code reader. (Before we entered them into a spreadsheet manually.)

Now we can print out winner’s addresses on sticky labels. (Before we printed them out in Word, cut them out, and taped them onto the package.)

These thing are so nice, but it took us a while to get them all in place and running smoothly.

What’s more, we now have our own *building* now. For the last several years we’ve been running this whole thing out of an old student rental I bought on the cheap. Now we have space to spread out and grow. But it’s taken us a while to move in.

Plus, we had a lot more prizes to give out this year. A lot more books and a lot more winners.

Now, answers to a few questions.

How will I know if I’ve won?

A package will show up at your house in the next couple weeks. A springtime surprise.

Please keep in mind that while there were a lot of winners, there were also a lot of donors.

If you won one of the specialty prizes, like the favor ring, or my tuckerization, or the ARC of Stardust, I’ll be getting in touch with you over the next couple days. So if and unfamiliar number shows up on your cell phone, you might want to answer it.

Will you be posting up a list of winners?

Sorry. We won’t. It would be a violation of the winner’s privacy.

If the winners are okay with it, we’ll share what’s happens with some of the bigger prizes. Like the favor ring and the ARC of Stardust. But that will be their choice, I’m afraid.

If you’d like to take a picture of yourself with your prizes, you could post them up in the Worldbuilders Facebook Group so that everyone can gaze on you with envious desire.

What were this year’s final totals? How much did we raise?

For that information and much more, stay tuned. We’ve got a lot of cool news coming up….

pat