review & plans

hey everyone, I've written this post a few days ago and didn't get around to post it yet, so even though I'm a little late I wish you a Happy New Year 🍀!! I hope you all had a good start and could get some rest.

I also want to talk about my plans for the coming months and do a review of last year. The short version is that I'm very grateful that I could get back into doing things for the comic. And that many readers are still sticking with me and want to know what happens between my boys really means so much to me 💙 Thank you ;;

I'm pretty satisfied with every scene I could finish last year and I feel really proud when I look at them. I think reflecting and reviewing the scenes before I showed them to anyone helped me a lot to voice my own thoughts about the pages. I now write down what I think of the pages after I finish the scene. I also made it a habit to never post the scene on the same day I finish it. It's less stressful that way and I get to spend some days just letting the scene be finished and I can just keep it to myself for a bit.

Journaling turned out to be one of the most helpful things for me and it's still funny to me how I kind of got into that. When I first started writing Ghost Lights I had the strong urge to give Noah his journals as a tool to deal with his feelings and I wanted to show how capturing everything will help him solve problems and certain puzzle pieces as well 🦌 Now I'm doing it myself and it's so nice to be able to look back at older entries. Journaling is part of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and the tools I've learned have been really good for how I view my work and myself.

Keeping record of all the good thoughts I have about the things I create helps me to see those achievements even when I have bad days.

Speaking of achievements~ I'm really happy that over the months I could reduce the time I take to finish a scene almost in half! I think that's what I'm the most proud of and what I mainly worked towards to last year. It took months to get the hang of new ways of doing things, and I still haven't figured out all steps of the workflow, and I think it will be a „work in progress“ forever. But I'm so glad I took the time to make things easier for myself, and instead of trying to do things how I used to do them I just tried to work with what I have now. It was a lot of work to set it all up, it was a lot of trial and error, and the most difficult part was and is to unlearn things I had told myself for a long time („I can't do this, because....“), but it paid off so much.

I really wanted to let go of perfectionism, without losing any quality, and while I tweaked things... I somehow gained more time to add many details in backgrounds! In general I have much more fun while drawing~ And through the reduced time it takes to finish a scene I can make sure that I have enough off days per month and I can rest every day. I didn't want to be „faster“ to finish more scenes; I just wanted to gain time for myself so I could rest more. Because more rest means I have much more energy for my comic~ I think that's my biggest achievement of last year!! And I'm very proud of that🌱

Soo, this year I actually don't have any specific goals either, I just want to continue to find easy ways to do things, improve my skills, and I hope that I can progress the story steadily!

BUT I have a few very small changes planned for patreon:

Ghost Lights has been running since early 2017 and it's doing pretty well currently. But naturally people tend to lose interest after a while and I'm sure this happens to most series after a few years. It's just something that happens and I don't think my Hiatus made a huge difference (and I'm very lucky I can say that), but I think it's time for me to come out of my hermit crab shell and be a bit more active on social media again.... I thought about it and I think it could be good for the comic if I would show more of my comic progress for public, too.

Soo, change no. 🌺 1: the „baby leaf“ ($1+) tier will receive access to sketches and wips as usual and I will still talk your ear off on here~ (hehe), but the sketches and wips will be more of a „early bird“ thing from now on. You'll get to see the sketches first. But when I feel like it I might just post them on social media a few days later.

🌺 2: I have something nice planned for the higher tiers ($5+ and up) and it's a longterm thingie (I will tell you once i can start adding it as a reward) 🍑

🌺 3: I might implement the yearly subscription option for you! I haven't really looked into it yet, but some of you have been here for so long, I'd love to give you some sort of discount for pledging for a longer time.

🌺 4: I might change the pledge currency from USD into Euro. For existing patrons there will be no change in your pledged amount as long as you keep your pledge active, as far as I know, but I thought I should mention it here still!

Aand that's it for now~ I'll let you know once I implement those changes!

The sketch in this post is from my newest pages. I'm currently finishing up the sketches for scene 54 and I can start lining tomorrow! 🐾