Vlog 20160319 (Patreon)

[[Transcript]]

Patreon Vlog 19.03.2016

TCAF festival : www.torontocomics.com

VANCAF festival : www.vancaf.com

Okay, I think I got this sorted out technically, so...it's Saturday. And I am so tired. This is gonna be one of those not fun vlogs, where I basically just complain and apologize, I guess. But that's what I committed to, I said that no matter what was happening , I was going to give you guys a brief update on what was going on and this is just kind of true of my life in general, it seems to have this event flow, where sometimes I am able to, like, really dig into something and really produce a lot of work and other times I am completely diverted by something and unable to do anything at all.

So work right now has been going completely crazy, I am on this insane project with these insane timelines, but it's going okay so far! We just handed off project management of it from my coworker to myself. My coworker is going off for seven weeks to South-East Asia, I am really happy for him, it's been a really long time since he's had a good vacation, so he deserves it. And so I just picked up this project and I take it now - it's mine!

And yesterday we've had our first successful test of our preliminary prototype, which is made of aluminum and it's really heavy and I ordered all the stainless steel versions of the components, so stainless steel takes long time to manufacture, because it's very hard, so it takes a long time to machine so we are pushing all our suppliers on our lead times and we're like:“Please, please, can you make this go any faster?”. And they're like: “ You can't, you can't machine stainless steel any faster”. And I'm like : “Please, try!”. So I've got like all my steel ordered and it was extremely stressful and scary, because if you get any of those parts wrong, you can't do anything about them, you can't fix them - they're stainless steel, it's really hard to get any of that corrected, so...high stress, very high stress.

I am already at 55 hours and I'm just getting up to work from home on a Saturday to get a little bit more caught up, so probably I might target for 60 this week (it was about 55 last week). And the week before would've been longer if I wasn't the first week back from the vacation and transitioning on everything.

So that's happening and on top of that we have, like, more than one level of office drama happening at the same time that I am also kind of in charge of resolving now, now that my other senior coworker has left. So...and a third senior coworker is gonna leave in, like, two weeks. so, yeah, I am in trouble, I am in trouble at work. I am really stressed about it and I have a lot of going on and a lot of responsibility. So I am, like, barely awake right now, I can't even think about art, I can't even think about what I am supposed to be doing.

I have officially dropped out of Emerald City, hurray! It's kind of news for me because now not having to think about that, I can at least think about just getting through these next couple of weeks, but it's super, super sad. I am really choked about it. But even if I had managed to somehow pull myself together and get myself to the show, I'd be not in a very good state and I'd would not have anything to sell, I have nothing new. Even though I have “Team Burning” which I was hoping to print and the new “J-Pow” which just launched last week.

So all the Patreons should have, well, “2-dollar plus” Patreons should have access to that, I am talking to 5-dollar Patreons, so it doesn't matter: you have all access to it. And now it's by donation on Gumroad, which has been going okay, if I had more energy to promote it, I think it 'd be doing better, but for the time being I just don't know, I don't know what to do.

So I could have printed those two things, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to get that together with the bandwidth that I have available.

And I was supposed to pull together a book, and I've been working on the intersections (???), I have a couple of them scanned and I just need to clean them up and I can post then on Patreon, but I haven't even had the bandwidth for that. And I am now really stressed that I am not gonna have a book for TCAF. So n ot getting it together for the Emerald is one thing, not having a book at TCAF would be a very, very severe blow to myself and my progress...I don't know. It would be sucky, it would be really sucky to expand all the energy to try to get into TCAF, it's a curated show, I didn't go last year, I put on my application form like would have a new book at TCAF so “please, let me in” and they let me in! So if I'd drop without new book I'd be a real...jerk. So I'm trying to figure out what I can do now. I am thinking...the printer that I've been negotiating with that is local, and what I also wanna do for this new book is print as few as possible. Because the whole concept of inventory and traveling to try to sell books directly and distribution is mess...anyway, it's a little bit long story, I wanna print as few books as I can get away with.

So for that reason instead of running a Kickstarter before TCAF, there's a possibility that I might be able to finish the content of the book and do a short run POD. So print on demand has come a long way in the last ten years, and I've actually been examining the samples from this printer and the POD books are pretty good, so, if I did a short run: 50 to 100 books, print on demand, it would be very expensive, but I could get them in my hands and bring them to TCAF.

And it would be like an advanced copy that people at TCAF would be able to get and I could do that for VANCAF and after that running Kickstarter for the offset run.

Anyway, that's thinking very far in the future where right now all I have the energy to really think about is how I'm going to not blow up this project. So that's it: six minutes now. That's what I am going to get back to: I am going to work from home, I am going to do some project management stuff and trying to get it together.

And I hope to have more better news and more interesting stuff for Patreon soon...Sorry guys, thanx for your support! I'll see you guys soon...bye!