An exorcism, and musings of a commercial nature

I had the honour of assisting Mr Alastair Whybrow, today, when SL had the temerity to ghost him.  Ghosting, to those who might not have experienced this calamity, is the process where SL forgets to log you out properly at its end, leaving a phantom image of you at the last place you visited - and, more importantly, preventing you from logging back in again at your end.  There are a few methods which can disentangle you from this predicament, and I was able to suggest to Miss Valerie Bluebird (Mr Whybrow's indefatigable assistant) one that worked.

(Basically, there is a brief window of time every quarter of an hour or so when a ghosted avatar actually registers as offline, and if you can identify this window - usually, by getting an indefatigable assistant to send you messages continually until they get a "[your name] is offline" response - you can log yourself back in during it.  You may still need to go and confront your ghost, though, to get it to disappear.  The presence of both of you on the same sim causes the sim to think long and deeply about which one of you is real, and it will invariably pick the one with the more recent login time and other displays of activity.  So I suggested this to Miss Bluebird - who earns her keep, no doubt about that - and shortly thereafter Mr Whybrow was back amongst us.  Which beats waiting for a region restart, which is the only sure-fire guaranteed way to get rid of ghosts.)

Anyway.  Subsequently, I had a long talk with Mr Whybrow and Miss Bluebird, mostly on the subject of SL commerce and how to go about it.  Amazingly, for a resident of my age and degree of involvement, I have no commercial presence of any kind, subsisting in SL on premium member stipend, occasional tips for lecturing and poledancing, and otherwise buying Linden dollars as the need or the whim strikes me, for such modest purchases as I make.  Mr Whybrow and Miss Bluebird had much good and cogent advice to give on the topic of becoming an SL businessperson.

I suppose I am plagued by my own doubts on this topic... I worry if any of my stuff is good enough to sell!  Mr Whybrow, of course, has no such concerns, or at least shouldn't have; he has found a niche where he has few competitors and even fewer equals, making micro-prim jewelry of amazing detail, beauty and exactitude.  Me, I just bang prims together and stick scripts in 'em.  They amuse me, fair enough, but then I'm easily amused.  Would anyone else be amused?  To the extent of spending, like, actual money on these things?  Or Linden dollars at least?  (Which are actual money, even if not an awful lot of actual money in RL.)

Excessive musing and self-doubt will probably be the death of me.  Never mind.  (While I muse, of course, other people might want to check out Mr Whybrow's store, Sparkle of Sound - I have been known to go round it myself, thinking i. oo, pretty jewelry, and ii. I will never ever be this good.)