Catching Up On Commissions

Hello everyone!

I'm not really sure how to start this post. I've drafted it both as a long ramble and as something short and to the point. The former feels like I'm making excuses, and the latter feels like I'm being rude ... or ... that I'm sick or demotivated or something, which isn't the case.

I don't really like to post blunt announcements - you know I like to write a bit - but at the same time, I'm aware that a text ramble isn't the most interesting thing to read sometimes. So I'm going to try and cut a bit of a middle ground here just so that the message is clear, but also somewhat concise.

Anyway. For the next couple of weeks (at least until the end of the month) I need to stop working on my interactives. 

Why? I have a huge backlog of commissions that I need to get caught up on. This is for two reasons:

1) People have been waiting on them for a fair bit
2) I need to clear my commission queue so that I can take more commissions so that I can put food on the table and such

Game development - as much as I love it - has been getting in the way of written story commissions. Between writing huge commissions for A Tiny Furry and a lot of content funded by everyone here for A Tinier Furry, some story commissions have fallen onto the backburner a bit and my queue has gotten a lot larger than I'd like it to be.

This is my own fault. During my last commission run, I simply took on far too much. I was too eager to serve everyone who wanted a commission from me, so, instead of being selective, I committed to writing everything. It was a beginner's mistake! This is not something that I will do in the future, but ... me and my queue/workload are still feeling the effects of this silly decision months later.

Having a huge queue on the back of my mind effects game development because it's essentially background stress. I'm thinking about all the work that I need to do while I forge forward in Quest, and it effects my train of thought more than you might think. Similarly, while I'm working on my commissions, I'm thinking about everything that I need to do in Quest.

So ... one of these trains of thought needs to be halted for a little while. I don't like halting either of them because I'm financially responsible to both, but, when I break the numbers down in my head, I've wrote something like 250,000 (give or take 20k) words or more of game content for Patreon in the last seven or so months. That's like - a lot - it's a huge novel - bigger than any of the Lord of the Rings books. Not saying it's of the same quality - but it is of a quality - and that's a lot of words for anyone to write.

So taking the rest of July off of development - putting it out of my mind entirely - to catch up on other commitments and not work my fingers and brain to mush ... it feels reasonable. It's something that I have to do to not drive myself insane, basically.

Don't get me wrong - I'm mentally sound right now - which is why I'm making this call. I need to take a couple of weeks to fix a bad decision I made months ago so that I can go into the rest of the year with a healthy workload and healthy mind. 

I promise at least two game updates a month, and, only having delivered one, I completely understand if people are upset about this. I'm really sorry. As said, I promise that I've learnt from the rookie error that I made. By taking two weeks to knuckle down and clear my queue - and clear my mind in the process, also - this won't be happening again.

The upside is that I have a total of at least four stories on the way this month as I forge forward into queue clearing. The shortest of which is like ... 5k words ... and the majority are 10k plus. And they're all super good! 

I dunno the ratio of people who are here for the game versus people who are here for the stories, versus people who come for both, but! I hope that big burst of story content this month will suffice until I can get back to working on the game in August.

I'll have two stories for everyone this week!

I hope that you all had a decent Monday!