2023 Retrospective (Patreon)

2023's over! I hope it was a good year for everyone, and hopefully 2024 will be even better!

This post is more so a critical look on the main mistake I made, writing it down here allows me to sort my thoughts and make it 'official' in a sense. It's not a full retrospective month-by-month, things were so over the place (scenes being done a year prior to upload) that it wouldn't be of much use.

This year I attempted to release more scenes that have been collecting dust, like Moon Goddess, Manon and the pregnant version of Lexie (before that got sunset). Keyword here is attempt because while I had made an effort to it, there are still some left. With the Auc Vault it's easy for me to visualize and plan the release of each of the scenes, however I was often inconsistent in following that. Which just caused everything to be delayed, and re-planning everything again just felt like a waste.

Susan's Story

I believe a large part of this can be contributed to how the Susan scenes progressed over the year. For context, her pregnancy arc started in May of 2022. This year I was only able to go from week 20 to 25. I did some extra's in between those, but putting it like this shocks me how little progress has been done on it. It frustrates me how aimless I must've looked, especially because I always knew what to work on next for her. Out of all the characters, Susan's outline and scenes have the most thought and preparation work put into them because they're so story-focused. And there in lies the issue.

I just don't want to write as much anymore. Especially with Susan my consistency has dropped of hard, which in turn caused everything to be delayed as I kept putting it off. Each entry having a full story with dialog feels too much now, it starts to feel too rigid and like nothing happens. Or what happens is simply resolved in the very same entry or the next. I suppose the actual writing just isn't engaging for me anymore, yet stubborn me holds on to the outline that I had set out for myself. For example, the upcoming yoga scene (week 28) ties nicely to #68, that's not something I just want to skip over. But I also can't get myself to write the full length story. I could get people to help, but with Susan I really want to do as much myself.

Writing Balance

As I have developed as an artist, my habits and preferences have gradually changed to focus less on full stories. I didn't really realize it until this year, which is why there are characters like Millie and Allaire that I fully intended on continuing, just end up stuck. Thankfully, I have found some success with Grace's progression (and Sofi too), where each scene more or less summarizes what happens. Doing it this way offloads the work onto the 3D scene themselves.

In the case of Sofi, I was able to go full story mode for scenes I was motivated to write. And I believe that's the key here, the flexibility to delve deeper with the story whenever I feel like it, but keeping it short otherwise. This will be my new default moving forward, for projects that I write myself. I believe this will really help to unstuck existing projects/characters. Which brings me back to Susan...

For Susan I unfortunately will have to cut a few entries down to shorter versions. 2023 showed what the alternative was, and I really don't want that to happen again. As much as I would love to give Susan's pregnancy (which I was looking forward to for years) as much work and detail as possible, it is also important to recognize if something is NOT working.

Takeaways

For 2024 the main theme for me is organizing, which in turn will hopefully make me a lot more consistent. 2023 has shown me what happens if I stick to the old plan and way of working, and that is not one I want to repeat.

With all of that said, it was still a great year where I got a lot of things done! This post was me focusing on the one part I was least happy (and frustrated) with.