Last's week Discord meeting summary

If you've read my last public update you already know there was a Discord meeting last week. It was open to everyone, patrons and readers, and it seemed I REALLY needed that.

First of all, thank you to all of you who came by, even just to tell you couldn't stay for long, or couldn't join the vocal chat but wished us a good session. Thank you also to my Patrons who upgraded their pledges or donnated. Thank you. I hope you didn't feel like you had too do it, this wasn't what I planed, but every € and $ counts and it definitely will help a lot!

Now, the summary.

It was amazing. It started as a short explanation of my current situation, exposition of all the ideas, plans and projects I could work on to make things get better again, and slowly moved to a brainstorming with readers and patrons. What they (you) thought was interesting, warnings to not burn myself out, and even very good additions to my plans.

1-Current situation and it's developpement.
I currently have only up to 8 hours per week to work/draw. Since BF is home 3 full days and a half per week I was supposed to have more , but it seems I really can't work when Shrimpy is around. So, I only have up to 5h of free time on Friday, and 3h of free time on Saturday, 8 hours on total.
Obviously sometimes I need to rest, and I use some of those precious hours to nap, or just eat dinner, or like I said in the previous post, try to find ways to earn money, or do some paper work. In the evening I'm also way too tired to start working, I can't work during the night (and working past 7PM is a bad habit I had a hard time loosing, I don't plan to fall into it again).
In July, I will also be mostly unavailable. I have 2 full weeks of class planed, and I'll take 2 weeks off.
In August, I'll have up to 14h per week of free time, almost twice as much as currently!!
Then, starting September, Shrimpy will go to their Nanny 4 days a week, and it'll be my real come back to work and drawing comics. Saddly that means I'll be even more in need for money.
About that : I'll continue to have only 4h of class per week starting September. Financialy, it will be even harder. And that's what led to the next part.

2-How do I plan to make money, what are my plans?
-During my vacations I'll draw an Illustration serie I'll then put on my online shop in August. At first it'll be Patreon exclusive. Patrons will see the illustrations first, and 2 or 3 days later I'll post them on Twitter. Also, my Patrons will have priority on the sells. It means that if they want one of the originals they can tell me on Patreon, and I won't put the illustration they want on the shop but sell it to them dirrectly.
I'm not sure how much I'll be able to draw yet :) but I can't wait!!
-I have a second Patreon page project. I won't talk too much about this one, but if things don't change and if I still only have 4 hours of class next year (September 2023 to July 2024) I'll probably set it up for January 2023. It's a very well planed project. 3 updates per month max, pay for the update you want, and everything sketched before the launch of the page. I thought the thing so it won't be too demanding and so it doesn't interfere much with Rainette. Patrons even gave me more ideas to better it more. It's a NSFW project tho, and it's totaly unrelated to Rainette or my other works.
-Starting September I'll go back to Twitch too. And since I don't have enough classes this year... I'll just start to give Comic classes live :) I still don't know how much I'll ask for, but streams/classes will obvioulsy be free so everyone can join. What I'll ask payment for is corrections, proofreading and personnal advices on "students" work. It'll be 2 or 3h per week on Fridays. I'll probably have nothing to proofread at first xD or maybe do it for free for a few weeks before I moove to a more profitable business model?
Also. Using what I already have for my classes, I'll slowly start to put everything together and make class book I'll then be able to sell to my IRL students, but also online. This will happen in 2024 or 2025 xD Don't be too excited. (Rainette still comes first ;p )

3-The brainstorming.
The key word was : Passive Income.
Because all my projects described before are nice, but don't forget I'm tired. And if I suddenly feel like this is too much (and it probably is) I'll have to slow down. This could have been ideal plans before Shrimpy, but right now? I still don't know my new limits, and I prefer to work on Rainette than do 5 things at the same time, and not enjoy my kid, and burn out again on the top of that.
Produce new content takes energy, and right now I don't have a lot. I still need the money though, and since I can't produce that much before September, and maybe won't be able to do more than Rainette starting September... I need passive incomes.
Laura (friend of mine) then reminded me that I still had fan-merch :D
Oops... how could I forget about that? My fan-merch will be back in my shop before July.
I'll also change shop plateform at some point, becore BigCartel costs me almost 10€ each month, and sometimes I don't sell anything for 3 months straight.
The Twitch classes are very close from the concept of passive incomes too.
And Drig (Patron) suggested I could potentialy upload a raw version of those streams on YouTube too. Raw because I don't have the time nor the energy to cut or rework my streams before posting them online.

There is way more to talk about this brainstorming, but most of it still needs to be developed in my head before I talk about. Anyway. In short :

June
I'll work on my commissions I took last month, and finish my Klimt redraw
Fan-merch back in shop
July
2 weeks of classes
Plan a serie of Illustrations (patreon exclusive at first)
August
Original Illustration serie put on the shop
Will work as much as I can on Rainette -> Try to be done with the cover + bonuses
September
Kickstarter Prep'
IRL classes start again
Twitch classes launch
October
Kickstarter month
November
Start Rainette Chapter 3
Sent Rainette to printer the 15 Nov
Twitch
December
Y/Con (Paris) the 3rd and 4th, and sell Rainette on my booth
Continue work on Rainette
Twitch

This meeting helped me a lot, seriously. I feel less shame about the whole situation, and even if I'm still frustrated because I wanna draw and I can't, I don't feel guilty as much as before .
I'll have to wait until September for things to go back to something more acceptable again, sure, and you'll have to wait a bit too, but I'm doing my best, and I know the frustration part will fade soon.
Financially... I'll have to fight.
Please, help me promote my work so I can gain a bigger audiance, and maybe get more patrons and potential readers, customers, Twitch students, etc.
...because I need to be realistic : if I can't get more IRL classes in 2023 again... I don't know how I'll be able to continue working on my webcomics "full time" if I don't grow more on the internet.

Thank you.

Bisc'


PS : Hope there isn't too many english mistakes aha...