August 13 2020 - Progress Report & Google Drive For All My Writings (Patreon)

Hey all.

I apologize for not having an update last week.

These past 2 weeks have sort of been a hyperextension of the general listlessness and frustration I’ve been dealing with for a few weeks now. I think the best way to describe the past 2 weeks is “soul-searching.”

I’ve been dealing with a severe case of ennui, a frustrating dissatisfaction with my work and a listless wandering around lost as I try to find a solution to it. The cancellation of Surrosluts at the beginning of the year, the production problems with Phazon Addendum B (which then cascaded into me having to completely rework Samus into an original character to avoid more copyright-claim nonsense), and my overall dissatisfaction with how Liziverse Episode 1 has turned out. All of this has led me down a rabbit-hole of constantly second-guessing myself and wondering if I really belong in this scene at all, or if I am wasting both my time and your time pursuing these worthless, inane ideas.

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks crashing through dozens of ideas—and I mean dozens of ideas—looking for something new, something bombastic, something noteworthy. And I don’t mean just considering a single-sentence elevator pitch—I mean plumbing the depths of an idea, outlining progressions, collecting and sorting references, and even straight up writing entire screenplays.

Only for all of that to be thrown aside, as something comes up short: Runs too long. Too wordy. Too slow. Too vanilla. Too boring. Already done the idea. Already used the characters. Really, the list is almost as endless as the faults I found.

Throughout it all, I kept returning to Overbreed. Of all these bombastic ideas I pursued—demons, robots, tentacles, gangbangs, trainbangs, competitions, exhibitions, threesomes, foursomes, lesbians, bisexuals—all of them burned bright, but none of them burned long, and all of them fell short in some way or another. And then every time, I returned to Overbreed.

It’s the one idea that has persevered through the crucible that has been this soul search. In the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny where all these ideas saw their better, Overbreed is Mister Rogers in the bloodstained sweater (and I just dated myself with that reference oh lord).

I am still grappling with it, to some extent. My full mind, body, and soul are not committed to it one hundred percent yet. My biggest reservation right now is that I will be plunging into yet another Overwatch project, hot off the heels of Rabbit.Hole. Twice, technically—Rabbit.Hole Episode 2 and Episode 3 are separated only by No Gods, No Kings (which PornHub took down while refusing to give me a reason as to why despite my asking them, though it’s still viewable on my website); and Rabbit.Hole Episode 3 and Overbreed Episode 1 will be separated only by Liziverse Episode 1, which I honestly don’t consider a real project because I just hold no love for it, no passion at all. It was a project I literally wrote in 45 minutes, on the rebound from shelving Phazon Addendum B after weeks of stress, and it shows.

But with every project I pen and banish to the cylindrical filing cabinet, and every time I return to Overbreed yet again, I become more and more convinced that it’s what I am going to work on next. It’s what I need to work on next.

People often think that artists are in control of their work, that it is the artist who decides what art they create. And in many cases, for many people, that is the case. But sometimes, for some artists, quite the opposite occurs. Sometimes, there is a piece of art that simply wills itself into existence—the artist is less creator, but more conduit. The artist does not paint it, or draw it, or sculpt it, or animate it—the artist simply helps deliver it, like a midwife helps deliver a child.

And for me, right now, I think Overbreed is that piece of art that wills itself into existence. While I will very likely be the one committing time and resources into bringing it into existence, make no mistake—it will not be a matter of me using my hands to create it, but rather it using my hands to create itself.

You might have noticed that this post doesn’t have Liziverse in its name, nor a progress report number. There are two reasons for that: the first reason is the obvious one, that I suspect many of you have already suspected from a combination of how the last few reports has gone, the missing of a progress report, and the decidedly philosophical opening of this post: I haven’t worked on Liziverse at all in the past 2 weeks. Indeed, I haven’t even so much as opened the project file.

The second reason is less intuitive, but it is that I am going to be doing away with tying progress reports to specific projects altogether. Instead, I will simply be titling them by their date, and they will be more general-purpose, encompassing all of the efforts I have pursued in the week they address.

Similarly, you may have noticed that this post has a collection of posters as its image, and none of them belong to any previously-mentioned projects. I am sure many of you already surmised as much, but these are a subset of the many ideas that I pursued in these past 2 weeks—specifically the few ideas that reached the transient stage of getting placeholder posters, to help me cement and visualize the premise and tone.

These posters, and the latter part of this post’s title, go hand in hand. I have decided to create a Google Drive that will serve as a living directory of all of my writing work. Every draft, note, outline, document, and screenplay I write will go into this Google Drive, free for all of my Patrons to peruse as they see fit. I’ve thought on it for a while, and while I’ve always been aware of how much time and energy I put into them, it wasn’t until now, where I’ve managed to burn two whole weeks doing nothing but writing, that I realized just how significant an amount of time this writing really consumes. And, logic dictates, that if I am putting all of this energy into producing things, then it’s only fair that I share it with the people who are allowing me the freedom to put all of this energy into producing them.

And so, that is exactly what I am doing. Many of these projects will never see the light of day. Nary, I say a vast majority of them will never leave these digital pages. Most of them will never even get a screenplay. But just because they are stillborn doesn’t mean no time went into their creation—a child being stillborn doesn’t magically erase the months of pregnancy the mother went through, the hopes and dreams and aspirations the father had for their imminent family.

The Google Drive is not yet complete—there are a lot of documents I still need to upload to it, and a lot more that I need to at least write high-levels for. They all exist, I won’t be creating them from nothing—but they only exist in my head, a problem that I discuss in the “What is a bible” document in the Bibles section of the drive.

Indeed, the bibles in particular will need a lot of attention. I have a lot of bibles to commit from my memory—Blue Star, Surrosluts, Fallen Throne, Rabbit.Hole, Hiveship, DOAFACU (Dead Or Alive Fantasy Aardvarkian Cinematic Universe), No Gods No Kings, and the still-incomplete Overbreed bible. And that’s all just off the top of my head.

I will not worry about writing those bibles until after Liziverse Episode 1 is released, though. Once it is, I will take a week or two off to focus purely on writing all of these bibles out, finishing Overbreed before starting with Blue Star and Hiveship, and then filling them out from there.

However, I will be taking another day or two to at least finish uploading and committing the non-bible text documents—things like writing the high-level of the Rachel idea, or the sparknotes for the Surrosluts story (which will admittedly be difficult to follow without the bible, but I’m sure you all can suffer through and get the gist of it at least). Once I have all of those written, I will be making a formal post for the $2 tier with a link to the Google Drive—consider the access this $5 tier gives a form of early-access to the in-progress version of the Drive.

As a final note before I end this post on the link to that Google Drive, I do want to say that I absolutely intend to finish Liziverse Episode 1. In fact, just a few hours ago, Innie got the first pass of her dub audio to me, all delicious 7 minutes of her sultry voice as Elizabeth. It’s good stuff, I assure you, and if anything will save this project from utter mediocrity, it will certainly be her performance.

That being said, please do be aware that I am not a methodical, systemic artist. I am not a machine whose switch gets flipped to “On” and then I work ceaselessly until a product is made. That just isn’t how I operate. I am a creature of passion, and the efficiency of my progress is directly proportional to how committed, how devoted, I am to a project. And my passion meter for Liziverse Episode 1 is so low you could easily mistake it for empty. The only devotion I have to completing it is the shame of having no new releases to share with you all.

So it’s going to take me a while yet. I’ve done away with deadlines, and it’s a good thing, because I can’t give you one. I’d like it to be at least in post-processing by the end of the month, but half the month is already gone and I haven’t lip-synced or detailed a word—or hell, even lit the office scene yet. So don’t expect it any time soon, and honestly, don’t expect it to be particularly high quality. It takes a lot of commitment to polish a project, and I just don’t have that commitment. It’ll get done, but I can’t guarantee it’ll be done particularly well. I am fully expecting it to be the worst video I’ve made since the Witcher short. And I’ve made peace with that.

I highly recommend you all make peace with it, too.

Enough waxing poetic. Here’s the Google Drive link. Remember that it’s not finished yet. Keep an eye out for the $2 tier post about it. You can consider it up-to-date, sans bibles, then.