I did a sum this week that I'd been avoiding. Not a complicated one. Just: if nothing changes, how long can we keep doing this?
Every small studio has a version of that number, and it's usually written on the inside of someone's eyelids rather than on a spreadsheet. Ours was somewhere in my head as "a good while." Putting it on an actual page, with actual months, made it a lot less fuzzy and a little more real.
It's not a scary number. It's also not an infinite one, and those are different things to feel. Before the sum, waiting on a publisher's reply felt like a shrug. After it, a quiet week has a slightly different weight. Same silence, but now I know what it costs.
The useful part was making three versions. One where things go well, one where they go slowly, and one where we hear a polite no from everyone and have to decide what to do next. The third was the hard one to write. I kept wanting to make it kinder than it needed to be. But it turned out to be the most calming of the three, because once the bad case had a plan attached, it stopped being a shapeless worry at three in the morning.
We also talked, properly, about what each of us can do outside the studio to keep the rest of life steady. Nobody here is pretending this is a plan to get rich by spring. It's a plan to keep making something we believe in without wrecking ourselves, which is a smaller and more honest goal.
There's a funny side effect, too. Knowing roughly how much time we have has made some decisions easier. The big shiny improvements we're saving for later feel less like deprivation and more like sensible sequencing. And a few things we'd been quietly dreading, like asking for help on the boring admin, stopped seeming like a luxury.
I don't think I'd have done this sum if we weren't in a waiting period. Busy people don't check the fuel gauge. It's only when the road goes quiet that you look down.
So that's where we are. Not panicking, not complacent, just slightly better informed. If you run a tiny studio and haven't done your own version yet, I'd gently suggest doing it with a cup of something warm nearby.
— Thiago, newly acquainted with a spreadsheet cell
Posted by Thiago Moreira · November 5, 2026
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