Start of 2023 update! (Patreon)

Hello Patreon gang!

Happy New Year! I hope you're all doing well. Thank you for your lovely comments about the new mini-comic. I'm so glad you enjoyed it!

I'm here to share a general update about Heartstopper and how I'm doing, but no worries if you'd rather not read. The main thing I wanted to let you know is that this Patreon will remain on hiatus until at least February. This means that nobody is currently being charged any money for access to this Patreon, and also that nobody can currently join this Patreon. It will remain this way until at least February, or longer depending on how I'm feeling over the next couple of months. I'll talk about that more in the rest of this post!

Thank you so much for your patience and support in 2022. It has been an incredibly exciting year for Heartstopper and therefore me personally. But it has also been the most mentally draining and exhausting year of my life. Writing season 2 in such a short timeframe was the hardest thing I have ever done in my career. I had to give up many things to do it, and I wanted to, and I feel very lucky that this is my life and my career, but it was not good for my health. I was not able to look after myself in any capacity; I had to give every ounce of my time and energy to these scripts or we would not have been able to shoot season 2 in 2022.

I know everyone's going on about 'burnout' these days but that's how I've been feeling for many years, and 2022 more than ever. I honestly feel like a shell of my former self. My mental health generally is bad and has been for a long time, and in 2022 my desire to be creative was the lowest it had ever been in my life.

But the season two shoot went really well. I am proud of my scripts, and the cast and crew worked incredibly hard. It was tough for everyone for various reasons, but everyone did such brilliant work, and I'm extremely grateful for how hard everyone worked despite the challenges they faced. Making TV is exhausting for everyone involved, but our cast and crew gave it their all.

I took a break from social media in December, and I ended up enjoying it so much that I'll be continuing it into January (with the exception of posting about the Nick and Charlie US release!). I also took December off work, with the aim to rest and try to live out my days without feeling constant deadline-related anxiety or audience-related anxiety. It's been a strange change of pace that my mind hasn't quite adjusted to yet. But for the first time in a really long time, I have started to feel the itch to create things for fun. A very very very small itch, but it's something, which is more than the nothing I've felt for the past few years. 

I created the mini-comic partly as a test to see how it would make me feel to work on pages again, and to my surprise, I didn't hate it or feel intensely stressed by it. So... mission success! As soon as I posted it, lots of people commented on Tapas/Tumblr/Webtoon saying how glad they are that I'm 'better', and while I really appreciate the kind words of support, I also don't feel 'better'. I'm still struggling with motivation, with creating new ideas, with audience and deadline anxieties. My long term goal is to return to the person who started making Heartstopper in 2016 for nothing but the love and excitement of it all. I hope I can become that person again, but I think it will take a long time.

I have to return to making the Heartstopper comic this month, or I will put myself in a very difficult position when writing the next season of the Heartstopper show. I need to have finished Vol 5 before I can start writing season 3, or else - because of when we have to shoot S3 - I will have to write the Heartstopper story for the show before I have written it for the comics, which is (in my mind) a nightmare scenario. So there is pressure there. Quite a lot of pressure. But I'm trying to take every day as it comes, making sure I'm looking after my physical and mental health while I have the time and energy to do so, and focusing on my own ideas and feelings. Being off social media is helping!

The number of people who now read Heartstopper is immense and the pressure and expectation that comes with that is extreme. It will be impossible to please everyone. There will be many people who will be unhappy with the routes I take the story, or feel that I could have done things differently and/or better. This is something I'm trying to find peace with, so that I can focus on rediscovering the original passion and love I had for the story when I began. 

The Patreon will remain on hiatus until I feel well and confident enough to share the comic with readers again. It will be at least until February but could be longer.

I'm very intimidated by the amount of work that lies ahead of me and the number of people who are waiting for more of the story and will be judging every element of it. But I feel hopeful that by returning to my roots - working on the comic by myself, posting here on Patreon and on my webcomic platforms - and while staying away from social media, I will feel the sparks of creativity and excitement for the story once again. Fingers crossed.

Thank you all once again for your support in 2022. I'm sending lots of love and wishing you all a Happy New Year!

Alice xxx