Sitrep for December (Patreon)

Okay, I definitely need this for this month. First, a quick update for Mass Effect:Final Error. I've gotten a fair bit of work on it done in the last couple of days. With any luck, I'll finish it tomorrow, then edit/post it on the 5th. 

With that out of the way...I've got to be honest here guys, December if kinda hell month for me. Ironic, given that I actually do celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. I may be suppperrr progressive(given my content here, that should be safely assumed -_-), but I'm still an actively practicing believer. Go figure, right? But that fact is, itself, the problem. Between Christmas events and family get-togethers, plus my Birthday thrown into the middle of the month just for some more chaos, I always lose several days of productivity each December. Minimum 3-4, sometimes more like a week of total days. 

This freaking sucks.

This doubly freaking sucks given that it's supposed to be the first really major release for Left Hand Magic this month. I realized that problem back in October, but there was nothing I could really do about how the timing worked out. 

Having explained the problem, now it's time to talk about what I'm doing about it. 

1) Prioritization. Left Hand Magic gets first priority this month, period. Even if that means cutting something else completely.

2) For my sanity, I'm cutting out the second short story this month. I will likely make a short-short for the holidays. Something in the 1500-3000 word range and holiday-themed. But, otherwise, I'm just making the one poll-voted short story this month. And even it may get pushed off into January depending on how things go. 

3) The poll for the Comic is going to be up tomorrow, with some old and new options both. However, I'll be hand-selecting those options to be lower-intensity stories. Including a possible holiday-themed one. The poll is also only going to run for like, 3-4 days, in order to give me as much slack to work with as possible.

4) I'm rearranging how I manage my time this month. Normally, I do all renders first and only after they are done or mostly done do I start on the coding/writing. I do this because it's been the most effective pattern for me after much trial and error. During the render period is when I do all the other rewards, usually. And end-of-month is usually the slackest period for my day-job stuff too. Hence how I've got it worked out normally. This month, though it's likely to stress me out a bit more, I'm going to be doing things a bit more piecemeal. That way, in the case of disruption near the end of the month (which is where it's most likely to be the case due to Christmas and New Years) I'll still be able to publish whatever I've managed to get finished up until then. I honestly have no clue what this will mean for the total size.

These are...all I can really come up with to do, without shorting some of the rewards entirely. To be honest, I had hoped to actually get ahead of the problem last month. Unfortunately, due to some badly misbehaving render sets, problems with one of my monitors, and the Thanksgiving holiday...it didn't work out that way. Anway, that's what I know so far...