Weekly Update - 11/27/23 (Patreon)

Let's all welcome Nick Vasquez to Kuserra! Joining in this week at the Scavenger tier, thank you so much!

Comic this week? No. See the Ramble (lol wut?!) for more info!

Drawing: Same as last week!

Playing: Baldur's Gate 3

Volume #1: Fenris sounds like it's still swamped with these pesky end-of-year holidays.

Ramble:

Been awhile since I rambled last, which is probably for the best. Anyway... have a holiday ramble!

I have a confession: I didn't get a whole lot of drawing done this week. Or any, actually. In fact, starting Wednesday after posting the comic, I kind of unplugged entirely, reducing my online presence to almost nothing. I ignored Discord, the news, my phone, and mostly just... existed. Which... honestly, I can't recommend more (in moderation.) Nothing seems better for mental health than truly disconnecting from the internet.

The holidays are always this weird sorta time where the weather changes, people take more time off and wanna do things outside the normal routine. This is the time when I start to reflect on the past year, where it's brought me and where the future might be headed. Hanging over all of that though there's this oppressive obligation to start thinking about buying gifts and travelling and spending huge gobs of money and exposing yourself to all manner of illnesses and doing anything outside of the usual routine... until the sweet relief of January.  As if it's any wonder why we all feel like the holidays are a most stressful time of year.

Now of course I'm looking forward to relaxing and seeing our family over the holidays. My family always throws a wonderful Christmas celebration at home. The house is always beautifully decorated, the tree is amazing, and the kitchen is always full of delicious food and drink. It's always a joy to see the parents and the sibling's family and then watch the nephews rip open their presents, scream with delight, and immediately toss whatever it was aside so they can start opening the next gift (sometimes not even their next gift). So it is merely from the perspective of me, right now, on this fairly typical Monday, where I am in 100% full work-mode brain, (and perhaps channeling the Ancestor's sass a little bit,) wondering how in the world I will ever finish Kiva's story within the next ten or fifteen years at my current pace with all of these interruptions. That's a very selfish way to think about it, I know, and I'm being facetious. Lemme 'splain.

Over the past five years, I've put myself into a position where I am most productive during my regular routine. When the husband goes to work, I'm generally at my desk, drawing and working on The Next Page. It's a great spot for me to be in, and it works wonderfully for most of the year. But I find that anything that disrupts that routine is often disproportionately crippling. Creativity requires finding a certain mental mode and staying in it, and I've yet to master the concept of remaining on task amidst distractions or crunching to keep on schedule outside of the normal routine. So things like seasonal cleaning, putting away the Halloween decorations, helping my husband put up the Christmas lights, cooking up a Thanksgiving meal, or even just thinking about/planning for holiday travel all muck with my routine, crippling my usual productivity.

HOWEVER, a shakeup of the routine DOES have its upsides, as it is easy to fall into a rut or drown in cyclical thinking. Breaking out of that can sometimes allow me to think of God Slayers-related things in a bilateral way, exercising that left side of my brain in ways that it normally is left to decay. Some of you who've been subscribed for a long time might recall I've tossed around the idea of designing my own TTRPG system for this universe. While the comic and its characters will always come first here, the purpose of such a thing as a game system is beneficial for a number of reasons. Having a functional system behind the story can help contribute to consistent worldbuilding and consistent rules for the story to adhere to, while also enabling me to escape from the narrow perspective of what's happening only to Kiva, Riley and fam and think more universally about how different characters and different stories might play out in this same world. Not to mention that every once in awhile, a comment or feedback delivered from someone who doesn't understand the story or isn't as fully immersed in it in the same way that I am, can be quite eye-opening. Sometimes it's hard to see the forest for all the trees, or in Kuserra's case, the opposite can be true: it's more like it's hard to see all the little tiny details for all the broad strokes worldbuilding.

I'd like to, at some point in the future, give you all a preview of what this TTRPG system looks like, to get your thoughts and input and feedback on it. I don't know if I'd ever actually sell such a thing, or if anyone would ever buy it, but maybe far in the future, if enough people might actually want such a thing, I could see publishing it some day as a pdf, perhaps with fancy fonts and art and stuff. Right now, all the components are still shuffling around and falling into place and being molded, shaped, and hammered into position. I'm happy with a lot of what I have so far, but it still needs a lot of work and probably a fair bit of playtesting before we can really get excited about it. Most importantly, I need to find a concise and effective way to explain its mechanics without immediately putting people off. As none of you might suspect, what I've written down so far for the system is... a little verbose. I know how surprising that must sound. None of you might expect me to ever use far too many words to meander my way through a thought or two.

Anyway, thanks for reading. :3