Update/Prologue/whatever post (Patreon)

Hey wow! A new Patreon blog! How long has it been since we saw one of these? …probably since I last apologized for not doing more blogs, or Patreon content in general, and promised that my next blogs would be about me reevaluating my creative process and getting myself back on a productive schedule. Well, you can see how long it’s been without those blogs, not to mention how all the other promised content either remains on hiatus or creeping out so late it might as well be (Seriously, it took me HOW long to cover an 11 episode show?) so you can already figure out my progress without a full written update. The world’s got enough How To Be A Better Person guides from idiots demonstrably incapable of being good people WITHOUT me adding to the pile. So, don’t expect any Here’s How I Got Over Writer’s Block blogs until WELL after it’s clear that I actually have shaken off those bad habits. Like, for more than a few days.

I can give you a sneak peak, though. One thing I’m definitely having to learn is Dropping Something That’s Not Working & Moving On. I’m not a quitter by nature. I hate leaving things unfinished, either permanently or even just to work on something else for a while. Once I start something, it HAS to be finished before I start something else. Now, that’s a pretty good trait to have, right? Determination and sticktoitiveness and all that. Well, aside from the fact that when I DO force myself to stop in the middle of something, I get so depressed that it’s super hard to actually go back to it again (I’m lookin’ at you, Jenna comics). But we can go on about that later, because I ALSO hate doing things out of order. If there’s multiple items on my To Do List, I always want to start with the first thing FIRST, and then the immediately subsequent one, and so on. NO SKIPPING OVER ANYTHING TO COME BACK LATER, THAT’S ANARCHY! Again, this CAN be a good thing, especially when it pertains to things you told someone else you’re going to do. If somebody, say, pays you money to watch the anime they added to a list, you’d darn well better watch that anime in the order you said you would, no skipping anything without notice. Ensuring your audience knows what to expect is a good thing.

But here’s the thing: the whole “Stay The Course And Never Give Up!” mantra only really works if the thing you’re not giving up is GOOD. If you grit your teeth and persevere and keep at something you shouldn’t have started doing in the first place, that’s sort of a BAD thing. I have a well documented problem with this. Heck, I spent two whole years of my life living in a city I had no business staying in because I didn’t want to look like a “quitter”. So if I, say, look at my convention notes and think to myself “Oh, that seems like something that should be a comic”, then that means it HAS to be a comic. If I discover days later that there actually isn’t any obvious jokes to be made, that doesn’t matter. I WILL sit there and stew over that one idea for days, WEEKS even; straining myself to squeeze even the SLIGHTEST drop of comedy out of this idea because I SAID IT WAS GOING TO BE A COMIC SO NOW IT HAS TO BE, DANG IT! Never mind how it’s a proven fact that the harder you have to force something to be funny, the less funny it’ll turn out to be in the end. Also never mind that spending more time and energy on one comic just means I’ll have that much less creative energy left for all the other ones. Also ALSO never mind that any of those later comic ideas would probably take only a fraction of the time to finish than that problem one. None of that stuff matters. Skipping ahead to do the easy ones first would mean doing things out of order, and that’s just MADDNESS, right?

Well, no, it’s not, but that’s part of what’s been dragging things out so long lately. I’ll have this sort of Conventional Wisdom Checklist of items that every update SHOULD have, and then spend weeks pulling out my hair trying to force those things to be funny. Have X number of pages about these panels, include Y number of cameos by real people so they can repost it on Twitter, reference That One Thing everyone’s sure to be talking about this year, that kind of stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with being mindful of what kind of content would attract the widest audience, of course, just so long as said content is actually GOOD. But that’s the thing: I’ve been forcing myself to work with ideas that aren’t actually good, struggling to MAKE things good rather than just chasing ideas that sound good of their own accord. And I’ve been going about it in the most tiring, time-consuming way possible to boot. All that is stuff I’ll have to change if I ever want to start getting things out on a normal schedule again

Which brings us back around to these blog posts, where I’ve had a similar problem.  Months and months ago, I said I’d write some blogs about a certain thing. That thing hasn’t worked out. Yet, instead of just moving on and writing about something else, my response has been to just sit and stew while writing absolutely NOTHING. As if months of releasing no content PERIOD is somehow better than delivering something different than the one exact thing I’d alluded to earlier. You guys prefer getting nothing, right? I’m sure each and every one of you LOVE watching your hard-earned dollars being sucked away by Patreon every month and receiving none of the stuff you were promised in return. That’s why each and every person who’s ever started donating continues to do so, and nobody has EVER canceled! HAHAHAHAhahaha…ha.

And so, in an effort to better myself, I shall be striving to follow the wise shouting of a terrible beardy actor man. To quit worrying and just… well, you know. And here we go, more blog posts! Because here’s the thing: I’ve had ideas for more stuff to write ALL THIS TIME. I just didn’t because I told myself I’d do something else first, and decided I’d rather do nothing at all rather than change that. …I might also have preferred to do nothing because I’m an incredibly lazy human being, but that’s another discussion entirely. Anyway, I’m just gonna dive right into those other blog posts and give you all SOMETHING to look at… and that was SUPPOSED to segue into the first of those posts. This is called “Prologue” because it was just supposed to be tacked on to the beginning of the “real” blog post. But looking over it all, this bit has already gone on a bit longer than I expected, and the following part is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY bigger than anticipated. I know, right? Me writing a blog post that rambles on beyond all reason. Who’d have thunk it? So, anyway, I’m going ahead and posting this bit now, with the “real” blog to follow in a few days, hopefully before Otakon. I know, I know, I’ve already got plenty of other things to take care of before Otakon, why add a blog post to the pile? Well, one of the pre-Otakon chores I already have is preparing for a panel where I ramble on about Digimon stuff, which is actually VERY relevant to the next blog…