Battle Plan (A super lengthy post!)
Hey guys, What’s up? Here’s the update I promised, finally! I hope to address concerns regarding the rewards for the months that I’ve not been around and the plans I have for the weeks to come. Know that you guys have been in my mind and heart all this time, it just takes time for me to articulate what I need and want to say! So, here goes…
First of all, I would like to thank you all for being so understanding and considerate during the past week since I’ve returned here. You are phenomenal and just have been so kind, I cannot say enough how grateful and happy I am to be back. Even the guys who had to drop their pledges when I disappeared, you came back with open arms and I just didn’t expect so much positive vibes despite my shortcomings.
I spent the past few days responding to friends whose comments, emails, inquiry, and complaints I’ve quite avoided for the past 5 months. Moreover, I chatted with the guys over at our discord community and, needless to say, I was overwhelmed by the good vibes of all the guys there. That place is a wellspring of the most creative and weird ideas you can think of and I hope it keeps on growing. Finally, warmed up I practiced my anatomy drawing and worked on some commissions which I am close to finishing, thankfully. I also got to work and collaborate with some friends here and I hope to post more collab art works in the future.
It took me a while to gather my thoughts around a particular dilemma on how I can address my overdue Patreon rewards, particularly the monthly polls I promised at the start of the year. The challenges I am faced with are the following:
1. Time- Juggling my time between day job, personal leisure and rest, family, communications (emails, replying to comments and inquiries, engaging in the discord and DA community in general)
2. Scale- As you may know, the last poll I hosted for Tier 4 and up Patrons was last December 2017. This means I have a back log of 9-10 months’ worth of poll entry rewards.
3. Logistics- Patrons who’ve left or moved down Tiers but hadn’t had their share of the rewards I promised on the months that they supported me. It can be harder to reach out to them and give them what was due them.
4. Content- considering the load of tasks I juggle; it can be hard to create personal works that you all came here for in the first place. Miko drawings, collaborations with friend artists, stories.
5. Physical/mental Health- This past week was very exciting and full of activity, and was generally productive for me. But I lack sleep as a result and I haven’t quite resolved my emotional issues fully, I fear that I may be risking it if I take things too abruptly
I do not wish to make excuses, and it is my desire to fulfil what I came here to do. However, I will need to ask for your understanding as I lay out my I plans to address these challenges. Because the work ahead is rather bulky, I’d like to segment it to “Bi-monthly” goals, wherein every 15th and 30th of the month, I will release an update much like this one, containing the goals for the next 15 days. This will go on up to December depending on our progress. I am hoping that through this, I will take on my responsibilities a chunk at a time and you guys will know what to expect and can easily hold me accountable for it! Oh boy!
Before I go on with the 15 day plan, here is my overall objective for the remainder of year 2018:
1. Finish up 4 pending commission pieces.
2. Finish 3 more 2017 poll winning entries.
2. Catch up on monthly poll rewards from January to the present month, that is roughly 18 Polls in total! 20 if I include October which is real soon.
Now this is really hard for me to do, but I have one plea which I hope you will forgive me for and kindly consider. And that is that I’d like to ask for a little leeway on the polls backlog thing. If it is alright with you guys, can we have one huge poll per month for those months from January to August? And then go back to two polls per month from here onwards. With this I might just make it before the year ends and hopefully get a fresh start. What do you guys think? *bows a lot*
Finally, here is my plan for the next 15 days:
1. Finish up 2 of three poll rewards from 2017 (Regal elf, Stumpy Roomates)
2. Finish one or two commissions (Armless elf and the other I haven’t decided yet)
3. Launch a 2 part Halloween Poll for October reward
4. Send invitations for January Poll to subscribers of that month. (launch is early next month)
These will be my top priority, so anything else will have to wait, sadly. I hope this post was informative and helpful. I know there are still many other things I need to talk about, like NSFW content and most especially our dear Miko Comics, which I have been slowly getting back to. While I cannot make concrete promises on those things yet, at the moment, rest assured I will try to address them in another post soon.
Alright, this has gone too wordy! But thank you very much for bearing with me here. Feel free to give me feedbacks or ask questions if there are things I missed or haven’t clarified. Have a great week ahead, guys!
Oh, and regarding the wheelchair! Well I borrowed it from Gammatelier. If you've been following him on Picarto and Discord, you'd know about the hot amputee girl with- ok i've already spoiled it enough! Find out more, go to Gamma! Why did i borrow his wheelchair? I just thought it looked darn aesthetically cool. Gives me all sorts of ideas. How about you? what do you imagine occupying this chair? Obviously I'm not borrowing it for no reason ;) We'll find out!
Comments (9)
My opinion should not carry as much weight since as I mentioned when i first talked to you about comissions I keep away from ongoing “subscriptions” to anything as much as I can. But I thought I would throw in my thoughts on not burning yourself out. It might be best to lower the ammount of future commitments you have coming in till you can hit a consistent work flow that wont burn you out; to use a road trip as an example, you may be able to drive 300 miles in 3 hours on one tank of gas speeding the entire way, but driving 3,000 miles will take more than 30 hours, because eventually you have to stop for gas, get some sleep, and maybe get caught speeding since you magnified the chances to get pulled over. Instead take it a little easier, find a pace you can maintain long term and focus on quality over quantity. Most of the comments I’ve read have said the quality of your work is what brought them to follow you; myself included. You are a great artist and worth the wait for the work you put out.
Thank you Darrell for the kind feedback and for the analogy ^_^ also, uh-oh, ill send you a message about that commission!
Oh on another note, while you're getting yourself sorted, you might want to take a look at the Patreon tiers. The $80 seems like a bad idea for the time being, and either the $15 or $20 level seems redundant. This is also your reminder about my offer to set up a discord channel for you (though I know you're trying to take a step back from discord a bit to focus on working).
I must say I supported you constantly just for the fact that I really needed 4-5 mouths to realize that you were gone. I have Mikey, Excilion and Tomboshi supported too, so you were not very high in constant drawings even back than for me. But you were one with polls and at least one per month would be great. I really not interested in seeing you overrun by the past polls, that only gets to that you left again for some months it would not be worth. Make a cut and move on and if some patrons go than they are more interested in your works than in the person behind it (but you are more important). Drawings could be done anytime, but they should not dominate the illustrator, that would turn into quantity over quality (by Excilion's edits I am still not sure how he manage this). Your pics were always on high quality, but you need time to get this quality and if you now have two finish 20+ pics in three months would destroy your new confidence completely. So move on I stay.
Thank you Amasch! Your support means a lot to artists like me. I won't let that go to waste, friend. Thank you for the tip btw. I just checked out Tomboshi's patreon and am now his patron too ^_^ Don't worry, I will do what I can and will still prioritize the present and the future, as Cafter put it. Your encouragement goes a long way, I know it wont be a smooth road a head but I do enjoy making artwork, so i have that going for me which is nice :P As for moving on, i gave my thoughts on that in my comments above. I believe it's too soon for me to make that call. I'll give myself a chance to make it up to you guys, and if it gets too difficult, then ill come back here and we'll see what we can do. Cheers!
I'd actually recommend staying at one poll a month until you can be certain its not going to overstretch your time. I'll admit I ama bit loathe to not get my money's worth from the past several months (Though I did drop you after June), but I'd rather see you get settled and sorted than killing yourself scrambling to make it up to us.
Totally agree on this!
I think consistent polls from here out are more important than redoing all the ones from the past months. Other than commissions, start with a clean slate and commit to it, what do people think?
Thank you Cafter! I'll think about it. Will do my best at the moment to achieve my goal for the next two weeks. If i am able to do the backlogs whilst making content for the present month, then all the better ^_^