New Year Wishes and plans for 2023 (Patreon)

Happy New Year everyone!

As I write these lines, 2022 should have come to a close all around the world, and we now enter a whole new year. I hope 2022 treated you kindly even in its final days; it has been a tumultuous time around the globe, but I pray you found happiness with your friends and families all the same. 

I would like to thank you all, my dear patrons, for your support across 2022; some of you have been here for half a decade now, others joined on the last month of the year. I appreciate you all. It is your help that let me live from writing, and I hope my works brought you a measure of happiness. 

As the year comes to a close, it is time to reflect on what happened this year and our resolutions for the next; I want to share mine with you, and think about what the future will look like.

- 2022 Retrospective 

I will admit 2022 left me with a bittersweet feeling. I feel that for one good news or victory, I've paid an equal price somewhere else; as if my life was an accounting sheet that market forces balance at their leisure. 

My Vainqueur webcomic, which I have worked a year on, came out in full swing and made a decent income, but ended up frozen after one season due to changes at Tapas and its own limited success; it is the tragedy of modern entertainment that something can be profitable and yet be shelved nonetheless. 

My patreon is still far, far away from what it was while I published the Perfect Run, and still didn't recover from Underland (which didn't perform well on Amazon); I still earn only half of what I did on 2021. However Apocalypse Tamer has found success on Kindle Unlimited and became my most profitable property there; far more than even the Perfect Run and Vainqueur.

Thanks to Tamer, the Vainqueur webcomic and other royalties, 2022 has been my best financial year yet; I look poised to do even better in 2023. And yet my private life is not going well; I struggle with back problems to the point I now go regularly to physiotherapy, set aside time for sport, and had to invest in special chairs to work better. I also find little time for social activities, including romantic ones, which end up leaving with a pervasive sense of futility sometimes. 

Like... I love my work. I love writing, and I love you, and I'm proud of what we've achieved together. I've written sixteen books on Amazon (divided into six series) since I became a web novelist and I love every single one of them. 

But sometimes I struggle to find what I have in my life outside of my work. It's like gas; it takes all the empty space you give it. And I admit that as 2022 drew to a close I've been struggling with something akin to burn-out. Not because I don't like to write Apocalypse Tamer, but because when I'm done with the chapters and related administrative work, I have little energy to go outside and, well, do something else. There's also the fact that working on a series with three chapters a week leaves me little time to explore new ideas, and the more I write the more I realize I'm better at shorter series than long ones. 

I'm something of a workaholic in general; I need to finish my stories and I put my work over everything else. However, eventually it becomes everything. I slowed down last year when I started suffering from stress-related gastric issues, and I think my back pains and the above issues are a warning that something has to change if I am to avoid a burn-out.

- Plans for 2023

I think that 2023 is a year where I will change my writing method, to try and break that cycle. 

My current plan is to finish Apocalypse Tamer; considering the work ahead, I expect it to continue well into April; I would say there are still thirty to forty chapters ahead, as we're in the story's last third. I'll continue as things are until the series is completed and eventually put on Amazon.

Afterwards... afterwards things will change.

First of all, I think I will take a pause from LitRPGs. While I am proud of Apocalypse Tamer and how it helped me tie my various series together, I feel the LitRPGs/game aspects kinda take away from characters and situations. When everything can be summed up into numbers and has to obey gaming rules, I feel it detracts from the general setting. Vainqueur the Dragon avoided this problem because it was a satire of the genre, but playing it seriously with Apocalypse Tamer made me realize the genre's shortcomings. I might return to LitRPGs one day, but in the short-term I'll move on from them after completing Apocalypse Tamer.

Second, I'll probably return to doing more than one story at once; but with a different schedule. I've realized that I love to experiment and staying too long in one story feels constraining; while writing two stories at once (like Kairos and Underland) was exhausting, I also felt more motivated because I could use different characters and genres. It helped me take my mind away from one story and gave me a breath of fresh air, so to speak.

I stopped doing that because it was stressful, but now I realize the problem wasn't writing more than one novel at once; it was doing it with strict deadlines.

Deadlines are what I struggle most lately, because my current ones are short. Many times I have forced myself to write Apocalypse Tamer chapters without giving myself time to refine them properly, and I feel this impacts the prose quality and character development (and in turn my enjoyment of the story) because I had to post this chapter at this hour according to the rules I set for myself. Deadlines are necessary, otherwise there's no pressure to get anything done; but I feel my current ones may not be the best. 

The problem is that I'm not just writing chapters anymore. I have my own company now to manage my intellectual properties, which takes administrative time; I need to follow-up on publishers I've signed with, survey projects, etc... I need to go to Physio and do exercise to deal with back pains, and I try (and usually fail) to set time to meet my friends or go out.

So... I think that when Apocalypse Tamer is completed, I will move on to smaller novels and follow less strict deadlines; maybe experiment, like writing a full book first, work on bettering the draft, post it on Kindle non-exclusively, and then releasing it chapter by chapter on Patreon and RR. My hope is to find a writing method where I can give more space to quality/improving the text rather than focus on quantity. The increase in royalties from Amazon gives me more leeway on that front.

I would like to set some time aside to travel as well. I'm something of a backpacker, and I haven't traveled much since the end of lockdowns in 2021. Yet it is quite important for my inspiration. The Perfect Run was heavily inspired by trips to Italy; Kairos, by research journeys to Greece; and Apocalypse Tamer by my experience in Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria and Romania. I find inspiration for my work in the outside world, and staying at home really is starving me of it.

I've been toying with a few ideas on the side, like a scifi anthology, a merchant hero or Aztec fantasy; these are genres far from what I've written so far, but I think it would be a good challenge going forwards. I've also been in discussion to develop another webtoon property, Djinn, which should be interesting.

So that's pretty much my plan for 2023: complete Apocalypse Tamer, then move on to schedule where I can write quality over quantity by doing research or reworking chapters for long, and give some more time to my social life outside work. 

I hope you will be there with me all the way through, and that Tamer and subsequent series will give you great joy.

In any case, I wish you all a Happy New Year and a great year 2023 going forward.

Best regards,

Voidy.