Patreon Update 6-7-24

Alright, let’s do this update.

I finished DD 202. Which is good, because I have clearly been struggling a little bit. I hate the word ‘burnout’ because when you listen to people who are experts in it, they split the colloquial category into burnout and overwhelm.

So, I’m going to talk a little about what burnout and overwhelm are. Who knows? Maybe it’s helpful for some of you.

When burnout is defined in that context, I laugh and it is the complete polar opposite of my mentality. Which is great. I don't have burnout. Burnout-burnout is continuing to put x effort in expecting y result and continuing not to get y result. The best parallel I can come up with is the claw machine. You know, the one that never ever actually gets anything.

Unless you are a savant at those things, you might have experienced the futileness of those machines. At a certain point you realize it’s useless, you are frustrated and you never want to touch those things again. THAT’S BURNOUT. Except when your life depends on the finances from said exercise, you push further. Imagine if that claw machine was what kept you fed, and you had to keep trying, hoping and continuing to fail to get the stuffed-whatever.

Imagine the resentment you’d build towards the processes and once you stopped or found any alternative to your time, how hard it would be to go back. Ta-da. That’s a small portion of what truly burned out authors feel.

I don’t have burnout, my expectations are low and I’m achieving well above them. You see many authors starting to break out and dream of hitting the NYT or some other lofty goal. A year or two later, they burn out despite doing well.

It isn’t about the current success; it is about the constant failure of their goal. Especially in goals that they can’t control.

Overwhelm, isn’t burnout-burnout. It’s when you have a massive pile of to-dos that might have accumulated when you were only getting 4 hours of sleep a night. Or it might be your brain being fried after being screamed at for half an hour before dropping your kid off at daycare.

Too many inputs and suddenly it’s all jammed up. There is no more bandwidth for outputs, certainly not creative ones. - This is me.

I’m working on things to try to rejigger my day-to-day so that I can get back to where I was. Right now I’m mostly getting 5-6 chapters Mon-Fri.

Anyway, enough of that. DD 202 is a decent book. I’m putting it down feeling like it’s a little transitional in the overall story. Not bad, but I’m going to do another heavy pass on it, much like I ended up doing to 104. There are a few threads I think I dropped, which might end up creating some new scenes in it. We’ll see.

Other news, I’m bringing on 2 new editors. You won’t see an effect on patreon until I get further ahead again, but I want to put out cleaner novels.

I might slow down audio again and put a proofer in there. Just to have cleaner things coming out. It cuts down a lot of drag on my end.

AO 4 has started. Ard snark is wonderful, as always. I managed to reread all of book 1 and 2. Normally I struggle to reread some of my books, skipping around quite a bit. There were little nuggets I was able to pick up and hopefully carry threads through to the book in very satisfying ways.

That and I have a fairly clear vision of what AO 4 is going to look like.

Webcomic is coming along. We have 7 episodes complete. I need 10 for launch and 6 for buffer. We’ve gotten several weeks of a complete episode in a week, which is what I was waiting on before I pulled the rug out from under the script writers.

They were doing the adaption a little too literal. There’s some work that has to be done to change verbal humor into physical humor and some angle changing to make it pop more. I’ve been reading too many webcomics (totally part of my job and not at all a way to procrastinate when I’m struggling to write) and gotten a fair idea of what we need to change.

The most recent chapters have been written and edited with that in mind. Significant improvement. Now we just need to look back at chapter one and find a simple way to make some of those changes and not redo the whole thing.

So, things are getting back on track. This week I’ve had 2, count them, 2! Days of 8 hours of sleep. It’s glorious. New editors start with AO 4. Webcomic feels like it’s been course corrected. Good things are happening. I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of digging myself out of the hole.

Things are on the up and up. Will I miss some more weekends? Not going to rule it out. I’d really like to get back on the book a month train. That means 8-9 chapters a week and rebuilding a buffer for patreon. Going to push myself this next week if the sleep doesn’t backslide.