First and foremost: Happy __th birthday to my lovely wife, Morgen Jahnke, who was born on Christmas Day in 19__.
For months, I’ve been mentioning a gigantic undertaking in progress and dropping some very nonspecific hints, mostly by way of saying, “If it seems like progress is not occurring at the usual or expected rate, that’s accurate, and there’s a really good reason for that, though I can’t tell you what the reason is.” Now I can explain everything.
tl;dr We have moved to Canada! Other than that, everything continues pretty much as usual.
We—our family, our cat, and our business—have relocated permanently to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is Morgen’s hometown and where a great deal of her family still lives.
Preparations for this move were a large part of why things have been taking so extraordinarily long in recent months, but I’m sanguine that work will soon return to something resembling normal. You, as a customer, don’t have to do anything, and nothing substantial about our books or your account or anything else that will affect you has changed.
Take Control Books is, and has always been, a mom-and-pop operation. When the business started back in 2003, Tonya and Adam Engst were the mom and pop in charge, and when they sold Take Control to me in 2017, Morgen and I became the mom and pop. We have always run the business out of our home, and our authors, editors, and other collaborators are all independent contractors. We don’t have a building, or a retail store, or any place of business other than the office spaces in our house.
The thing about being “mom and pop” is that it means being parents. Adam and Tonya have one kid, Tristan, who’s now in graduate school (also, as it turns out, in Canada). Morgen and I have two kids, who, as I write this, are eleven and seven years old. (I also have a 29-year-old son, but he does not live with us.)
Our seven-year-old has some pretty intense special needs, which I’ve written about extensively on my personal blog, and you’re free to read or ignore that, as you prefer. Suffice it to say that moving to Canada was something we needed to do for our family’s well-being. It was also an enormous, multi-step undertaking that sucked up vast amounts of my time in 2021, as if there weren’t already enough demands on it. But it is now (mostly sort of) done.
In terms of Take Control Books, basically nothing changes. Behind the scenes, a great deal of paperwork has occurred, with more to come, and boy oh boy are we keeping accountants (both in Canada and the United States) and lawyers busy dealing with the intricacies of taxes and bookkeeping. We’re going to have to get new ISBNs for our books at some point, and we’ll change our mailing address and bio in the various places they appear. But apart from that, everything should look and work the same. (We do plan to switch to a new payment processor soon, but that has nothing to do with the move.) Even though we had to start up a new company and shut down the old one, we are the same people, running the same business, and no personal data was ever bought, sold, or transferred to anyone else.
We have so very very many books that need to be updated, and new books to be written. So very very many bugs that need to be fixed, and features that need to be added on our website. So very very many new projects we want to undertake, and ways in which we want to make things better and easier for ourselves and our customers. So very very many things that I had planned to do months, even years ago, but was unable to due to (gestures vaguely) all of the above.
As we get settled, expect to see updated books somewhat more frequently! I also hope we can pay more attention to what we’re doing—fewer typos and dumb mistakes, greater attention to detail, that sort of thing.
That’s it. Thanks for reading! Happy holidays of whatever sort, uh, make you happy, and I’ll catch you again next week.