Titan Pulse

This will be a bit of a short update as there was a bit of personal news I wanted to share.

First, I'll preface this by saying I'm okay.  Last Friday I had to take the first ride I've ever had in an ambulance.  I won't go into detail but essentially I was having a health event that necessitated that I be brought into the ER.  Strangely I found it more fascinating than scary.  I kept watching all the stuff they were doing with a "Oh, so this isn't like the TV shows at all" curiosity.

It has led to me having to make some life changes in the last 4 days.  The biggest is dialing back my need to 'get everything done at once and never rest until its finished.'  The work is never 'finished', so my setting a task to complete it is an act of futility.  And it turns out, can actually really screw up your health.

I debated even making note of my ride in the wee-wah-wagon as I really hate talking 'health' online.  But its going to mean a bit of a change on how I do things that were once considered 'work'.

I treated Patreon as 'work'.  It started out as just a fun thing I wanted to do and share with people who were interested.  It was supposed to be a place where I posted bits of creativity that I thought were fun, or whimsical drawings of small equine-dragon women with swirly knees.  However over the many months, my obsessive nature started turning it into a job.  I had to only do full pictures and had a rule of "I must have a full painting and two fully inked/rendered images per month".  

As my work as a caregiver started to become more demanding, I also started riding myself about how I wasn't getting all the goals done for Patreon finished as well.  A fully rendered painting and two full inks.  Every month, despite having a 24/7 job as well.  Things became less about drawing and posting fun things, and more about "It must be on the level of posting pages of a full colour book each month or I'm utter trash."

Who would have thought it would have some pretty dire consequences.

So, I'm going to be shifting my priority.  I need to start treating Patreon like it was intended: A place for whimsical art, and weird writings, and (hopefully) more stuff about the weird world in my head, and the more fleshed out modern world I'm part of (So, more guitarist women).

I will still do a sketch each month for the $10 tier and above of course, but I'm dialing back my obsessive need to get an absurd amount of mini-poster sized art pieces done on top of everything else.  Things will be a bit rougher at times in terms of just goofy concepts, and the upcoming comic isn't going to be measured against pro-comics because I literally can't consider myself a comic-writer/artist.  I'm new to that field, and I want it to just tell a fun story without worrying about all the fiddly things I see pro's harp on constantly.

So more pantsless Cinders.  More sketches of things around the world, or musing about weird ideas I have for the place.  But more doesn't mean "It must be perfect".  That's a job.  This is just going to be fun stuff.

I'm also treating my caregiver job in the same way.  I'm deeply dialing back pre-worrying about everything, about obsessing about what might go wrong, and instead am setting a bite-sized goal each day, which finishes in time to let me have time to rest as well.  

So far it's working.  Hopefully this can be a long term thing.

-T.J.