Well here I am, back a little more than a month after the last update to give another one, as is custom for this type of thing, and I’ve made a decision that has been a personally difficult one to make. When starting, and during, my hiatus I was very adamant about not only it being a temporary thing, but something that would eventually “disappear” as I would work to make up all the content I had missed postin when I was on it. It’s more than a year later now, and while I have been working to catch back up, I haven’t been seeing the returns I’ve hoped for. My original intent was to just power through this section, creating both my backlog material and moving forward into new stuff. But, as many people who try to finish large project know, something like this creates a mental block. The sheer amount of things you are telling your brain it “has” to do dissuades your brain from doing those things, and as it puts them off, they only get bigger.
While I have been making some headway in this “power through” area it hasn’t been as much as I had hoped, and my “re-warm-up” phase has been much slower than expected, All the while things I was “supposed” to do kept piling up, and it got to the point where my mental resistance to moving things forward was preventing me from getting back up to speed. Looking at things now, it could potentially take me years to catch back up on a reasonable schedule (especially for a person with a house, job, and schoolwork). If I wanted to catch up by the end of 2017, I would have to do more than triple-time on my work, and that just isn’t coming from a person who wasn’t able to keep “regular time” for the last year. And extending that deadline only increased the mental block. Devoting that much time to catching up makes the brain think it’s failing, and that just isn’t good for work.
So the decision I’ve made is to “give up” on the idea of catching up. And that has been a possibility from the start, but it was shunned by my more optimistic side. Now the idea’s still there, and maybe sometime in the far-off future when I’m being super productive I’ll be able to go back and catch up on everything or something close to it, but right now I’m going to focus on what I can do next. Nothing is going to stop getting made at this point. In fact, I intend to increase my output, but I won’t be re-instating the schedule and might even make up a new schedule sometime in the future. My current new goal is to get myself back to putting up at least one thing a day, but none of this will be trying to make up for lost time, and there will likely be many new projects introduced.
And even though this has been a difficult decision for me personally (doing this essentially makes my last year a creative failure), I know that both my few dedicated followers and those many on the internet just passing by really just want more things they can read/view to enjoy, and that me making nothing for months at a time isn’t what they came to see, nor is it satisfying “artistically” for me. This will hopefully end up with a better arrangement for all of us, and allow for my various sites to improve.
I always want to thank everyone who has viewed (liked, and commented on) my content, and I appreciate the patience of those of you who have stuck with me. I’ve got a lot of cool ideas and new projects in the works that soon we can hopefully enjoy together.
-Austin