Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself

Issue #56: Excuse the cobwebs, I’ve been busy building my empire.

They say time flies when you’re having fun.

Well, the past six months have certainly flown by, with my version of fun involving disappearing into a cave and spending 12+ hours a day working on a smörgåsbord of creative side projects.

Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve been up to:

• I gutted and re-built my personal website entirely from scratch.

• I designed my first 6 fonts (for what I plan to eventually be a collection of 100+) and opened a storefront on Creative Market.

• I hit record-breaking sales with my printable calendars shop, Tidy Plans, in October, again in November, again in December, and again in January.

• I fully resurrected Backstory Map Co. by giving it an entirely rewritten codebase, a dozen new products, and lots of other shiny bells and whistles.

And maybe even more significantly, on top of all of that, I’ve finally unpacked the metaphorical nomad suitcase and have officially settled down in Valencia, Spain — I just picked up my temporary residency card last week. 🥳

How I feel claiming victory over Spain’s unnecessarily complex and inefficient bureaucracy, after an 18-month saga that required endless patience and most of my sanity.

Oddly enough, even though I’ve just blown up my life and moved to a new city, on a different continent, in a second language, it feels like the puzzle pieces are starting to fall into place. It’s definitely a jumbo 5,000 piece-r, but I seem to have at least dug out the four corners.

Because with the newfound stability of a visa approval, a long-term apartment lease, and no boarding passes in sight, my focus is now entirely on my creative projects: Those listed above, plus a half-dozen others I’m tinkering with, and approximately 87 other half-baked ideas waiting patiently in my Notes app which I will dive into once I figure out how to clone myself.

There’s an endless amount of work ahead, but by spending the past few months writing thousands of lines of code and becoming completely fluent in Shopify, I feel like I’ve finally finished pouring the foundation for my side project empire.

In fact, this past weekend, for the first time ever, I answered the question “So Emily, what do you do for work?” by leading with my side projects.

This is the work that makes me feel most alive, that I could talk about for hours, that I pour my heart and soul into, and that willingly keeps me working until 2am most nights — and idk, something about hiding all of that passion behind my usual default reply of “I’m a freelance graphic designer” no longer felt right.

And not to mention, someday soon I plan to drop the word “side” from the term “side project empire” entirely. That’s my goal for 2026, at least.

Thanks in advance for following along as I keep laying more bricks.

-Emily 👩🏼‍💻🏗️

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PS: If you’ve got a project idea of your own that you’ve been sitting on, I’d love to hear about it — please please please reach out!

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