April is a Month (Patreon)

Ok I'm actually going to babble a bit and touch on the personal stuff, indirectly complain about being poor and so on. The important things for those of you who don't want to listen to me whine are:

-Making patron polls fun for me so I get burned out less.
- One comic a month. more if we make milestones ever.
- Art posts on Wednesdays.

Everything beyond this point is potentially annoying whining.

At this point the steady decline of productivity over the last couple of years due to various circumstances really needs to turn around. Part of this is just getting back into doing comics, I need to post WIPs more often and not get so fixated on things that I burn out and don't complete anything. I have been thinking a lot about how to fix the situation with polls so I can focus more on finishing actual projects and maintaining a better workflow.

Best solution is just to scale back for a while on details and minutia, save a lot of my effort on things I want to work on and keeping up with the commission wait list so I can release some of my financial stress.

The Goal is to do one comic page a month and I have not been doing that. In my patreon milestones I have that listed as at 1k. A milestone that I am, unlikely, to reach. I never have gotten that much support through patreon and I am unlikely to unless I make it more appealing by getting more stuff posted here. There is a lot of stuff that contributes to burnout making it feel like the effort isn't worth it: file sharing sites posting paid content, people trying to Ai art into a tool to eliminate artists, and a lot of sites becoming impossible to promote or share work on. Especially if your work is nsfw. Altogether it makes it really difficult to justify spending the time and effort on making stuff.

Dealing with all of this at a time when I was already having a lot of physical and mental health issues, bills that needed to be paid, job security problems, and my depression making a real play for dictating how things end for me: I wound up just loosing my will to create for a really long time. I'm trying to make an effort to get better, to start making things again, but part of that is I'm going to be taking some short cuts and prioritizing NOT burning out. I'm going to do things to have fun. If a patron poll winner isn't something I want to draw I will put it off or change it so it's something I like. There is a bunch of poll winners that got lost recently that I need to work on and some of them might be simplified to make them less stressful for me - I need to save my anxiety hit points for commissions. The patreon stuff is going to prioritize fun.

If you have been following me a while I am sure this is all familiar to you. My mental health issues have been a real problem going on 15 years. Trust me, if I was in a situation where I could address them more directly; I would. But that's not really an option for me so we are going to do what we can, when we can.

I'm not going to make any promises or predictions about streams: I'm definitely not in a place that doing that is an option. My goal for patreon is to do weekly posts again, and I want to post some kind of art - even if just WIPs, every Wednesday. More sketches and simple drawings. One comic page (more if I start getting support back), and working on full comic projects with Will and maybe other artists as well.