may 2018

hey folks, it's a new month and a new charge period.
april was a very exhausting month and i'm really feeling it; i woke up at 6 AM and i'm only finishing the quick drawing for this update now at ~4:30 PM because i ended up redrawing it 3 times.

down to business: first of all, i'll be closing out the $25 tier next month. everyone in that tier will get their credits for the charge at the beginning of this month, but please remember to move down to whatever lower reward tier you want before next month.
anyone in the tier who neglects to lower their pledge amounts or unpledge altogether will be blocked and then unblocked to force-delete their pledge, to avoid any issues about accidentally overcharging someone who didn't realize the rewards were being removed.

next: i'll be starting fresh meat this month on (hopefully) the 11th.
i'll be neglecting to update the side comic for the $15 tier for the next week, until it starts, so that i can put the time into making a rudimentary website on the same host i used for drop-out and making a sketch buffer to hopefully mitigate stumbling over deadlines.

as a rehash, fresh meat is hopefully not going to be the length of drop-out, even though it takes place over a week, technically linearly longer than drop-out; most of the scenes are much shorter, because it's not meant to be a character study like drop-out.
while every story i write is with the intent to provide some sort of information/knowledge, unlike the previous comics, my goal with fresh meat was to just provide a general realistic portrayal of psychiatric wards (from my experiences mixed with some anecdotal inputs so that it isn't TOO skewed), as opposed to arguably complex emotional or ethical issues.
because its purpose is more literal, there'll be fewer symbolic elements and themes, and a little less serious, but it's still going to be in full color with no limitations on the structure/page length/story length, etc., and, HOPEFULLY still interesting to read.

so the update schedule will be a little here-and-there for this next segment. the current goal for a work schedule is:
monday: side comic update for the $15 tier
wednesday: discretional update for the $15 tier -- ideally, a side comic update, but possibly just a sketch comic or nothing, depending on the progress outlook for friday's update
friday: midnight update of fresh meat for the $5 tier
saturday: stream

my priorities here are 1) that there are at least 2 comic updates per week of some kind; 2) that fresh meat is updated on time, even at the expense of the less intensive comics' updates; and 3) my own health, honestly.

i've been feeling progressively more burnt out since i started this patreon, largely due to my own inexperience and setting goals way higher than reasonably feasible (example: how i wanted to put out a completed, full color side story every month alongside drop-out's update schedule), which i feel financially obligated to still try fulfilling.
i don't really take days off, as the days in my schedule where i don't put out an update are spent working on them. i usually don't even have the time in my schedule to sit down and work on the writing portions of these comics and i regularly take 3-5 hours out of my sleeping time to get it done, which makes spending time out of the house or on hobbies way out of the question.
it's not great, and it's made me much less invested and interested in my work, but my living situation now isn't currently one where i'm worrying about being evicted if i don't make my rent, so i'd like to find a schedule i can settle into and allow anyone who is unhappy with that pace to opt out of paying their cash dollars for it so that when i do have more stringent financial needs, i have something i can sustain.
some odd months ago i mentioned various options for taking downtime and because i don't like the idea of working less, i'm not sure which one i even want to try. the options with the fewest cons seems to be "1 successive week off every month" or "push a 2-day 'weekend' into the schedule somewhere" -- which both add up to about the same amount of total time off a month (the 1 week off is actually less time off, but more back-to-back time off is more useful for dealing with burnout), so i may be testing those out in the future after trying to come to a mental compromise.

i think that's just about everything, poll will be up in a bit, thank you for the patience and support and have a goodun