Life Update (Patreon)

I wanted to give everyone a quick update on what's been going on with me, and especially why I haven't posted much art over the past week There have been two things that happened that have made it more difficult to post than I expected.

Firstly, I've been doing more writing. Unlike art, it's not really able to post a "sketch" or WIP of writing. I can write for an hour, but not really have anything I want to post because it's either small scene snippets or a series of stream-of-consciousness ideas. Writing like that desperately needs editing before releasing into the wild.

But more importantly the job I took on this summer, which has allowed me more of this free time in the first place, has become rather more than I bargained for. I was hoping I'd be able to keep it to a relatively straightforward part-time position where I go, do my work, leave, and that's it. Over the past month or so, however, I've been getting more and more involved. I've become so valuable to the team there that from week to week, they sometimes have difficulty functioning without me. (This is for a number of reasons, but mostly they're short-staffed. Which is why I'm there in the first place. They also don't have many people with my particular set of skills, and very little redundancy. So for example, if their animator is out, I'm literally the only other person who can animate, and so I get pulled into those projects.) I've also started to get involved in more of the management of the business, because again, I have experience there, and they really need the help.

This is good and bad for me. The good is, I have as much work as I want and it pays pretty darn well. The bad is, I'm really getting pulled back into the world of multimedia production, which is a high stress environment with very complex creative projects and long hours. Over the past few weeks, they've been asking me to come in more days, stay longer hours (I get OT at least, unlike the salaried folks there), and handle more stuff. This past week I worked a full time week—four 10+ hour days—on an extremely detailed shoot that required a ton of attention to detail.

It's so insanely difficult to give all your creative effort to some other company during the day, and then come home and draw or write for yourself.

As much as I hate to admit it, this is burning me out creatively. Which is no surprise, really; I had the same difficulties when I worked in TV and in other media positions before that. Of course then I just drew when I felt like it and didn't have a Patreon, so I could just upload whenever. If you look back through my gallery, you'll see years where I posted very little. (2014 is a good example. I only posted like a dozen pics over the entire year, plus the ass zipper jeans comic. The comic took me like six months to get through. Not coincidentally, 2014 was when I was working in TV.)

Anyway, this isn't likely to be a long term, ongoing problem. I'm still planning on keeping my hours there to a minimum and put more time into my creative stuff during the week. I actually have some cool stuff planned and sketched out in various stages, so I'll be uploading again soon.

Thanks!