Project Update: Work Schedule, Story Content & the Future (Patreon)

Hey!

Just realized that it's been about 3 months in which I haven't posted any regular story content aka. "my characters posting pics or chat histories on Twitter".  

While I have no "obligation" to make these social media posts as they are not part of the Patreon rewards  and free for everyone, I still feel like explaining what's going on as they are still important to the progression of this project.

The issue: It basically started in February, the same time I also made it my goal to have monthly releases which started as a test and which worked well so far. I intend to keep this going for now as I feel much more productive when I'm working in a rhythm like this. However, this also made me burn out a little as constantly being on a deadline can be stressful if you're not used to it.  

So naturally my priorities became to put out new albums in time which didn't leave a lot of resources for the story content which also needed to be thought out, set up, posed and rendered. 

On top of that came that the first, let's say "Chapter" of my story has been told and while I have ideas and know for the most part how the story will progress, it's not written down and organized in any way, yet - which just added to the issue of not having enough time as I'd not only need to produce these images/posts but also make sure they're making sense and going into the right direction for each individual character without conflicting with each other.  

So this lead to me (my characters) only sporadically posting things on Twitter over the past months. My last attempt to get the story rolling again was with Kendall's interview on the local news which will play a bigger role in the future - but I couldn't find the time to spin it further, yet.  

Conclusion: While I can't make any concrete promises, I want you to know that I acknowledge that the lack of story content is an issue that I try to resolve, but that I still might need a bit of time to get the ball rolling again. 

Some of you might suggest to scrap the monthly releases but I think the biggest issue is not that it's too much to handle, but that I stressed myself out too much as it was a completely new rhythm for me that I was not used to. I always feared to miss the deadline which turned out not to be an issue in the end. I feel like I'm getting more acquainted with it now and that I can soon handle more story content again.

Preparations to organize new story content has already begun and I'm currently testing out Trello to create long- and short-term roadmaps and goals for each character and the overall story. Having this in place would immensely help me to see the bigger picture and come up with new posts on the regular. I can't say if that'd bring me back to posting ~25 social media posts a month but it'd make these posts matter more. Quality before quantity and all that.

Disclaimer: I also want to disclaim that these are all new experiences for me and that work schedules or album releases might always be open for changes in the future. Since the beginning of this project I try to find the best way for me to handle and organize everything and it takes time to see what works and what's not as I've never worked on such a big project before. I think the monthly release schedule has potential but I'll probably need a few more months to be sure if it's really sustainable.

I also want to say thank you. In these 1.5 years I've never received any impatient comments or complaints about how I handle this project and with over 500 people subscribed, I think this is something irregular in this space but highly appreciated. I'm really happy that you're all so supportive and enable me to do this. The only reason I make posts like this is to stay transparent of what's going on, but never have I felt the need to make these kind of posts because of any kind of outside pressure.