I'm alive!!

And finally, so is my PC!!

But I'm also ridiculously busy!!!

I have the bad habit of not publicizing anything until I have a shitload of sparkly, impeccably phrased content, and/or some amazing grandiose life-upgrading tip that I can stuff 1000 words into. But then I realized:

This kind of makes it look like the blog is dead, doesn't it? (It's not)

I honestly started this site as a place to post about my progress. But then I had nothing but ideas for tutorial posts, then also got the idea that making actual progress posts would be worthless and not to the interest of anyone—and while this may or may not be true, but it does definitely defeat the point of the blog itself.

Why did I spend the time and effort making a custom blog and buying a domain if it's just going to act as proof of my apparent inability to put out content?

So, serious question: should I post more often, even if I won't have any amazing time management revelations or similar to attach to the progress update? Or stick with posting only when I have a lot saved up to say? This post, for example, had been saved up for an entire month, but I just kept it there because I didn't have (what I felt was) 'enough' for it.

Anyhow, onto the actual update:

Current progress

It's uhhh slow. Very slow. Slower than I had discredited myself for.

Example: I've previously timed that doing an episode's layout look about 6 hours, and putting in the speech and panel frames took around the same amount of time. So a total of ~12 hours to finish the preliminary prep work. Great, I can do it over the weekend then, I thought.

It recently took me two weeks to get that same amount of free time.

There's an excel sheet I keep to document my progress every day. It's become more like a journal, but the thing is—I spent 98 days on the last episode.

98 days!

And I'm actually still not done!!!

I started marking down the approximate hours spent daily around halfway through this journaling, and there were 19 days straight where I was able to draw absolutely nothing. It was broken by a four-hour burst on the 20th day, but then five whole days after that were also marked down as zero. I slacked on noting down the hours afterwards but I'm pretty sure that many more zeroes followed.

I do have good reasoning for this absymal progression. Back then, I had been busy as fuck with long-distance moving and other pretty big IRL happenings that needed to be taken care of at the same time. I'm not sure exactly what's going on now that that's over with, but the stream of shit to do does not seem to stop piling up. I have legitimately come to think that the only way to solve this would be to win the lottery. Except I'm not overworked or balancing multiple jobs, so why??

Time management adventures

I used to have tasks scheduled by deadlines:

It was written under the mindset of "anyway, just get this done by that day", which means it most likely won't even start by almost that day. Since I obviously have the self control and motivational tactics of a delirious tablet screen—which is something I have unfortunately had first hand experience with recently, adding to the time—I've found that the best thing to do for me was to break apart the goal into digestible chunks and disperse them daily.

I've tried doing this with a few different time management softwares. The one I'm currently using now is Todoist, which is also how I've come to know I have an unreasonable amount of tasks to accomplish daily—though I do still recommend it because the amount of work I'm able to do ties directly into the amount of other tasks I have, so I need to know what else is going on that day outside of the comic to be able to plan out its progress properly—but whatever I use, the outcome goes like this:

• The first few days—great! I'm able to finish the task, and even get a head start in some extras.
• But then I miss just one day due to unexpected business, or even half a day—and the tasks just start piling up.

Missing one task quickly becomes two, and just like with beginning this blog, the burst of motivation I got from the Grand New Plan™ disappears as it stops working out. No, I'm not demotivated to update either this blog or the comic, but it really does feel fruitless at times.

As I write this I have three overdue comic-related tasks that I'd been dragging along from literally two weeks ago. I had already unscheduled the leftovers from the previous episode, hoping for a new start, but yeah that didn't happen lol. I knew I was going to miss the October deadline I had set for myself, but now I don't even want to set a new one just to fail right through it again.

Sure, some of these problems may be alleviated if I just stretched out the schedule across more days. Or a few more weeks. But then it goes back to the whole daily dispersements thing.

The real main problem is that I have a life, though it's generally recommended that comic artists don't, but people gotta eat here. So at any time, I might have to do something that takes 5+ hours or entire days off my schedule in one fell swoop. And yet I don't want to pre-determine that I won't have time until I actually find out that I don't—I want to keep pretending the optimal schedule might be achievable, even if I have to reschedule tasks a hundred times afterwards. Is this is a shitty idea? Please let me know if you've got a time management system that works well for you.

The single ray of light

This is an ephihany I had the day I was finally able to draw again:

Why? Because I looked at some old panels and they were really, pretty damn ugly. A lot of things were just completely skewed or misaligned, and I was honestly baffled I haven't noticed it before. Not saying the current picture is the greatest—there's already something I don't like about it despite the fact that I made it this post's titular image, and I'll probably figure out how to fix it when I finally post the comic—but holy shit there were some scarily trash images.

Going away for a while definitely helped my eye discern things a lot better. I'm not glad I couldn't get any work done, but I'm definitely glad I couldn't post anything that I would've deeply regretted.

Future plans

"If you're so slow, why don't you get some help", you may ask.

Am planning on it!

I had in fact been planning this for quite a while—probably some time during the whole 98 days of stagnation bull of the last episode—and this is another recent source of business that I am aware of: I might be changing jobs in order to better afford hiring assistants of my own.

I will be doing it regardless, and I already have a pretty concrete idea of how the breakdown of tasks will work and the materials/tutorials/etc. that I'll be providing to ensure the art stays consistent, but the main issue now is that I just don't have enough for people to assist for. I had initially planned on making a hiring post at the end of October, but before hiring anyone I need to make sure I have a significant amount of things for them to actually do. And honestly, if I can't even finish the panelling and bubbling in two weeks, then getting more people on board isn't going to help.

So tl;dr: things are going slow af but PERHAPS this wave of business will wane, perhaps I will get paid more, so that I will perhaps be able to pay you to FINALLY publish the comic at the beginning of next year. Perhaps.

But I'll slap someone if that doesn't happen.