Weekly Update - 211 - 3/25/24 (Patreon)

Amazing announcement this week! In case you haven't heard! You know, I gotta do my due diligence to spread the word as often as I can and in as many places as I can because if I don't... who will? Having to do stuff, the bane of being a solo creator!

So we have launched our first book, which is now available for preorder on Fenris Publishing!

You can pre-order it now here: Fenris Publishing, LLC

Also don't forget to vote in this week's poll for the next character you want me to do bonus art of! Who Should I Draw Next? - Round 3 | Patreon

Again, trying to make these kinds of polls a more regular part of Patreon here, cuz I just find it super helpful. It defers the decision-making process a little bit and helps me break out of my default brain modes, which helps me to do more drawing! So please, vote all you like! Tell your friends to vote! Write a bot to pick options at random! No, don't do that last one.

Comic this week? Sigh... I dunno. Where I'm sitting right now, at this very moment, I'm really tempted to just take the week off, maybe do some housecleaning. Maybe work on sketching out more upcoming pages? For the sake of my own sanity? Sure, let's go with that.

Drawing: Page 192-194, Page 200 special thingy-mo-jigger and whoever wins the poll.

Playing: Rimworld 1.5 and Unicorn Overlord

I should probably continue reading House of Leaves at some point. I never do enough reading when we're just hanging around at home.

Ramble:

Yay new exciting announcement! Book! A book exists! Or it will exist soon! After all this time! Cry and excite and happy joy fluff!!! Fennec screams and foxsnep noises and tail noms!

Feel free to skip all that text underneath this line! Nothing to see here!!! Go have a happy joy joy day of happiness and joy!

(Deep breath followed by dramatic tone shift, red velvet curtains, a warm cozy leather chair, a fireplace, an overfilled snifter of brandy) Rambles are... or were originally... supposed to be a safe space where I can share and organize my unfiltered thoughts, seeking to perhaps make some sense of the chaos inside my head. Forcing myself to organize all my fuzzy ridiculous nonsense thought-blobs into structured written language, for it to be seen, read and digested. To create a sort of logical structure where the truth can be more easily filtered out from the madness. Some of you might remember I struggle with depression, though I have been doing okay managing it of late. Only a few years ago, these Rambles used to more consistently deliver analytical and introspective paragraphs -- or so I delude myself into believing I was once capable of such a thing -- and that is a standard I've perhaps fallen short of with them in recency. I can't tell if you guys like the lore blobs I've been leaving here when I sit down Monday morning and realize I literally have nothing interesting to say that isn't a spoiler for the comic, because I haven't actually given much thought to much else for awhile. It does worry me a bit to reveal some of the history of the world because there are many examples where the mystery of what happened in the past is more interesting than even a version of the truth. Then again, explaining the WHY in regards to why most people in Kuserra hate gods might also be important to some, since most of the characters in the present would all know an imperfect version of their past... but I digress. This ramble is about rambling. Among other things.

Rambles tend to get more introspective when I've been living inside my own head a little too much, ruminating cyclically on my own thoughts, chewing on them like lumps of fat that have long since lost the last vestiges of their flavor but are still too large to comfortably swallow. Prolonging this disgusting simile, Rambles may be akin to then spitting them as discreetly and politely as possible into a napkin, folding it and setting it on the table to be discarded and forgotten about later. Some sitting close to me might notice, but most probably won't think much of it.

Thankfully, I simply haven't had to do battle with my own emotions quite as often since we moved to this peaceful mountainside. So why am I being so analytical today? Well, I can't deny that I've fallen into a bit of a post-book-launch depression. PBLD? I didn't have a whole lot of expectations for what it would be like to launch a book, because I've never done it before. But I guess... some part of me felt like it would be... just... more? More than a quiet evening at home, more than just a few tweets, a handful of congratulatory messages and a glass of wine, all while sitting at my desk. That is usually my preferred kind of party, I admit, I guess I expected... I dunno.... Something... Else. Maybe it'll be different when I actually have a book in my hands, hammering home the reality of a physical thing that exists that I had a major hand in creating. Maybe. But I also kinda doubt it?

In retrospect, I have some thoughts about the whole publishing process, really. Its several emotional ups and downs. The stress of putting everything on hold to get it done by a certain date, the excitement of seeing progress after passing all that hard work to the publisher, the anxiety of waiting as communications from the publisher ground to a halt and initial hopeful dates slipped past... then became buried under additional months. The realization that at some point the book stops being my problem and becomes theirs, then, kinda, the dull acceptance of the fact that all the art I drew for it last year, while still a monumental improvement over the original art from 2018 and 2019, isn't actually my best art any more. I started redrawing those early pages because I felt as though my skills had plateaued, or that my art wouldn't improve much more or very quickly. Yet I've improved quite a lot in even just these past six months, and I didn't even notice until now, when the preorder announcement jumpscare smacked me right in the chat window.

Part of the issue is that having a book, written and illustrated by me, published and printed, doesn't really feel earned at all. The Imposter Syndrome is strong with this one because I largely devalue my own time, my own work and effort, perhaps to absurdity. I don't know how many hours of my life I poured into cleaning up and redrawing those early pages for print, because I didn't keep track. I worked on it part time for months, then I took an additional eight-month hiatus from the weekly comic to work on it full time. Even if I did keep track of the hours I spent, how can I put a dollar value on that time? If I was my boss, how much would I pay myself per hour? Given that my Patreon makes ~140 a month on average, and if I put in an average of probably 30 hours a week, roughly 126 hours a month. That means I'm worth a little over a dollar an hour. From that perspective, my time is practically worthless. And once it's behind me, that time that I spent on something has already been wasted anyway, so it's very, very difficult for me to pick up something I've made with my own hands and say, "yeah! This thing I made is probably worth money!" That's probably why it's so important for the publisher to set the prices. I might value my own work at less than $10 per book, not realizing it costs the publisher $20 to print them in the first place. (These are not unrealistic values, either, for an 80 page full-size full color book, printing even a small batch gets super pricy. I'm willing to bet our initial batch of only 50 books is costing $1000 for the publisher to have printed.)

But eh. I've never been a numbers person, and this comic has always been more about helping me manage my own mental health, rather than any effort on my part to try and make money from it. I'm proud of what I've done, no matter how much my brain tries to tell me I don't deserve to feel proud of it. Sure the dream might always be to eventually succeed financially as well as through simple self-actualization, but if I could only pick one, I just want to tell stories and get better at art. If you guys are still enjoying the on-going nature of sharing that process, then that's good enough for me.

I'm still gonna take this week off though. Need to... mull over some things... in my head.