Happy New Year! (recap + what's next) (Patreon)

Hello my gemlins~ 💜

It's been a while! I hope everyone survived the holidays in one piece with as little psychic damage caused by family and new year's shenanigans as possible and I wish you all the best for 2024! 😊

I wanna do a little recap of 2023, talk about things that went well, things that didn't go so well, what I've learned and how I want to continue going forward into the new year. If you don't care about me blabbering on about the past year and instead just want to read about what you can expect from me in the future, feel free to skip and scroll down to the "WHAT'S NEXT?" headline below!

2023 RECAP

In hindsight, I'm not sure how happy I am with how 2023 went. It wasn't the worst year for me personally by any means, but it also wasn't the best.

Some things I consider to be successes:

deal with a German publisher Papertoons to release #MUTED in Germany in 2024

#MUTED becoming a WEBTOON ORIGINAL

working with a US publisher to (re)release #MUTED

despite only a small quantity of artwork, I am still happy with the quality I produced

continued improvements to my over all physical health thanks to being more active + paying more attention to what I eat

Basically, the only professional wins of 2023 were still all #MUTED related, and on one hand I'm very happy to see that the series is still so loved after being finished, but on the other hand it's worrying me a bit, because I can't rely on #MUTED being the only project to bring in money for the rest of my life. My income has suffered a lot after I finished #MUTED and it's still not recovered, and I don't think Shallow Sleep will be able to keep my business alive for long. Which I already suspected when I started it, but it has still been a bit of a bummer to see that actually be the case.

The second half of 2023 was very difficult for me work-wise. Constant exhaustion that I'd already felt the months prior kept getting worse and by August I felt like my brain had been sucked dry, completely void of any creativity or desire to create. I tried to push through as usual because that tended to help but instead it kept getting worse until I kinda just gave up in November.

I decided I needed to take a real, proper, break in December, to take care of some irl things that I'd neglected and to be able to *RELAX* completely and stop thinking and worrying about anything and everything related to work and comics and art.Sadly, December didn't go as planned because my dog Fynn got really sick all of a sudden, so I spent the first 3 weeks of December running to and from various vets multiple times a week and was in a constant state of anxiety over Fynni's health. He's getting heart medication now and he's kind of doing better for now but his bad days happen more often now than they used to, and it's changed my daily structure and priorities a lot. My little old man always comes first and that won't change for as long as he's still here.

After christmas was the first time I finally felt like I was *actually* on vacation, I felt the stress slowly crumble off of me, I spent a nice few days with a good friend who came to visit, spent my birthday on the 30th with old friends I hadn't seen in a long time and finally spent New Year's Eve wrapped in cozy blankets with Fynni and snacks on the couch, doing absolutely nothing.

I barely thought about drawing in December, and I didn't miss it either, which has never happened before when I was taking breaks. That definitely showed me how much I needed to step away. Despite December not being as restful as I had planned I am glad that I paused work for the month, because I would not have needed the added stress of having to work on comic pages while caring for a sick dog who's literally my most favourite creature in the whole world, best friend and family all in one. 😭

It also gave me time to think more deeply about how the year in general felt and what to take away from that going forward. And my main conclusion has been that I need more structure in my day to day life, because the lines between work + free time are so blurred, I can never tell where one begins and the other ends, so I end up never really stopping to work while at the same time feeling like I haven't gotten anything done. There's a constant feeling of guilt which then prevents me from tackling other important things because it always feels like I have *no time* and should be working instead. It's a lot of overwhelm which causes paralysis which then causes more stress. Not good!!!! And also not fun.

Which brings me to......

WHAT'S NEXT?

To be honest, I feel like I would need another two or three weeks off before I feel ready to return to work full force, but I can't afford to pause Patreon for another month, especially now with the added vet costs 💦 And I feel bad for charging people without having *anything* to give back.

So, I have decided to come back now as planned, but it will be a bit of a slower process as I try and find my footing and build a solid foundation that I can stand upon safely.

I need more structure while also maintaining a bit of freedom in how I spend my work days because too much repetition bores me very easily. I've set up a schedule for myself that consists of a bunch of time blocks filled with various tasks.I'm not gonna bore you with details but I wanna try to learn and accept that I can't and don't have to do everything at once, making progress in small chunks every day is perfectly fine, so I'm giving myself 1 hour every day to take care of admin work (emails, editing, social media posts, patreon posts, whatever comes up) and 3-4 hours of intense focused comic work (no discord or phone near me during that time, I might also try switching from Youtube videos to audiobooks, but not sure about that yet since I do focus really well with videos running in the background).The other 3-4 hours of the work day are more flexible, depending on what needs to be done or what I want to do, as long as they're spent in a work setting (drawing extra illusts, working on other scripts, learning Blender, doing studies, streaming, any extra low-priority admin work).I'll ease into that new schedule slowly over the rest of the week and I'm sure I'll have to adjust it every now and then and there will be days where I'll be unable to stick to it, but I think the base plan is already pretty solid and can help me have a better overview of how much I actually achieve if the most important tasks (admin + comic work) are neatly packed into specific hours.

Now, to more specific goals for the year:

The plan is to finish Shallow Sleep in 2024. I love this story more than I can say but I need it to be over, because as mentioned above it's not sustainable longterm and I don't think it'll ever reach that point. I do, however, want it to be a solid finished product that I can look back on and feel proud of. I am also about 80% sure that I wanna release a print version once it's done, it'll most likely be back to self-publishing with very limited stock and I wanna make it as nice as possible, a rare collector's edition, if you will haha. But first I gotta finish the comic, the rest can wait until 2025.

I want to diversify my income more, although I'm not super sure what that's going to look like yet. I might push my INPRNT a bit more, try and do a little more with illustrations, maybe re-open my online-shop and offer some digital goods for the public? Literally any small extra amounts of money would make a big difference at this point, so I gotta see what I can do.I would love to grow Patreon more again too, it's been in steady decline for the past 2 years but I think the only thing that will get more people over here would be NSFW stuff and I just can't do that more than like once a year 😂 

I want to stream more often again. I really miss the interactions with my audience, and tying in with the above mentioned diversifying income - it has been a nice financial extra help during the times I did stream regularly, so I wanna pick it up again. It's been good for my mental health too, talking to people now and then, lol! It'll be art streams again, as well as gaming, I have collected a whole bunch of nice indie games over the past year that I got specifically so I can play them on stream! Please look forward to that and follow my Twitch if you're interested.

There's also a handful of personal goals this year, the 3 most important ones to me are:

finally finish driver's license (I started 2 years ago 😂😂 and then just didn't have time or energy)

continue exercising, focus this year is to build MUSCLE and get SWOLE AS HECK

socialise more (I've been hermit crabbing too much, this needs to stop); I wanna make more time for my friends again, possibly reconnect with some (irl people)

Other than that I'm not aiming for much this year, I want life to be stable and enjoyable, I wanna work hard and then be able to appreciate that hard work instead of feeling like it's never enough. And I also wanna relax hard and enjoy that time without guilt, too!

......... this was a long post, my apologies 💦 I'd been half writing this post in my head for the past 3 days and I'm sure I still missed some important things I wanted to talk about but this is already way too long!! 

Thank you all for your support last year and THANK you if you're still sticking with me now. I really, truly appreciate you all. 💜💜💜I'll do my best to have some nice things to show to you very soon, but for January I can't yet promise finished comic pages, it's been 2 months since I even opened the files, I will ease back into it over the next few days (got some irl stuff + doc appointments + driving lessons coming up this and next week) and will keep you updated of course 💜

Are you going into 2024 with any specific goals or are you just letting life carry you wherever it needs you to be? Taking things one day at a time? I'd love to hear :>

I'll see you very soon, thank you for reading all this if you did LOL 💜💜💜