It is done! My final commission is out the door and the list is clear. Thank you to everyone for your patience and support over this last year. Without it, I would have been at a loss and probably collapsed under the weight of my own expectations. But we did it. It took the whole year, but we're finally here and I'm glad to be out from under it.
So where do we go from here?
Well. Let's check out the schedule. (You can click the link for the site above to have a look.)
First thing's first, I'm going to take a vacation. It's just going to be a small one for a week, but I need some time to do... nothing for a bit. I'll save the remainder of my vacation days for one in the middle of the fourth quarter so I can have a more planned out vacation later this year.
Next, I'm going to be moving on to the more important projects, namely the comics. That will involve how I stream from here on out.
First, during non-SotS streams, we'll open with a short draw for myself, and then we'll be doing Sketch on the Spot clean-ups. I'm going to open up an order form, and take submissions for any SotS stuff done between Scream Stream '23 (2023-10-31) and this week's stream (2023-09-20). I'll be running them just like Sketch on the Spot, with a rotating list and while I was going to charge $40 each clean-up, some of them require less cleaning up than others, so I will have to prorate them individually (just go in knowing that $40 will be the maximum charge.) I will do three a stream, if people are there to see it (or if I'm given the go ahead to do them in advance) and then I'll move on to the next thing.
After that, during a stream, we'll be doing either working on the bookmarks, or working on either Various Happenings or The Adventures of Clara Cosmos. Usually a few hours on each if I can get away with it. I want to get my buffers up, as you can see in the table on the site, and I want to get back to posting regularly. I'll start posting comics again on the first week I pass the buffer for both comics.
Friday streams will be Sketch on the Spot as usual, but they will not add to the clean-up. A separate clean-up period for those will occur at a later date.
Once I've cleaned out the SotS Clean-Up list, I will begin working on my commission page again. I'm going to be removing the standardized options, and going with "specials" instead. What that means, is instead of offering the commissioner a bunch of options that they have to suss out, I'll just be offering a particular type of commission for a particular period at so many slots. This may be pin-ups, sketch pages, YCH style things, themed pictures, etc. Just whatever I'm interested in doing at that time. Other options, like the wobbles or character sheets, should remain and if I enjoy something enough then it might become a permanent fixture.
I am also going to clear out the Discount Bin and re-open it with a fresh list of things for people to peruse, again, with a limited number of slots.
I hope this, along with SotS and my Subscribestar (along with the future prospect of the bookmarks and other merchandise) will keep income going so that I can meet my obligations without stressing my ass out. I'm going to be a bit pickier, but hopefully this will keep things from getting overwhelming.
Meanwhile, once the buffer has been safely cleared by a decent margin (maybe two to four comics), I will begin working on side-projects, one at a time. The current one is finishing up the collaboration between myself and Azure, and then once that's completed, I'll be having a vote in my VIP channel on my Discord for what the next project should be. These will be, rather than large scale projects, more bite-sized chunks of projects in progress. So a chapter of story here, a short few pages of comic there, some vignettes or lore dumps for a variety of things, stuff like that so that I can step outside of the worlds of Various Happenings and Clara Cosmos when I need to, because I fully intend to immerse myself in them as much as I can.
And that is going to be, hopefully, how it is for the foreseeable future. Once the bookmarks are completed and printed, I'll see about opening up the shop and see what that entails, and once those are done, I'll see about making more cool stuff! I think stickers will be the next thing after that. So we'll see how it goes. But that's the plan, and I'll be doing my best to pace myself and not derail things. I'm going to be watching my commission load very carefully, and I'm going to be relaxing my quality on the comics (not too much) once I'm able to do so, in order to progress things along at a faster pace and give myself breathing room by building buffers more quickly.
Now, all we have to do is... enact it, and hope that the reduced stress and more downtime will give me time to focus on taking better care of myself, which will, in turn, allow me to do more things because I'll feel better. A positive feedback loop, we can hope.
Thanks once again for reading, and thank you for your support. I'll see you all next week, and I hope you have a good one.
~Spooky
P.S.:
Co-Host is sadly shutting down next week so I will no longer be updating that. If you're here from there, and want to follow me, there are a bunch of gallery links on the page. Or you can just bookmark www.foxsaliant.com
I haven't been updating dA in a while because its new UI doesn't work with PostyBirb and my inbox is full of crypto and NFT scams, so if you've been trying to contact me on dA, I'm sorry, I just haven't gotten your PMs because they've been buried under garbage. Please PM me on Furaffinity or Inkbunny instead. I generally get to those... fairly quickly? I do try and update FurAffinity and Inkbunny as regularly as I can, and Newgrounds, Eka's, and Itaku are pretty easy for me to deal with, too.
I also post to Mastodon (on Aethy) and Pillowfort, but I don't really get a lot of interaction on those (props to the people who like all my stuff on there, though, I see you. You're awesome.) I don't really do social media that much, though, and I gave up Twitter over two years ago and I'm just not interested in getting a BlueSky account.
And of course, there's the SubscribeStar, if you're interested in supporting our endeavors here.
So I'm going to be trying to get everything of mine on the site and kind of make it my home on the net for the foreseeable future. I'm getting old, and I just kind of want to settle down, internet-wise. If something new and shiny comes along that's appealing to me, I might make an account, but I'm not going to try and be complete for anything on other sites as far as uploads go. Fox Saliant will be where everything's at, at least unless something happens to mess with that, so, that's how things are going to be going forward. I just have a lot of catching up to do on my uploads and spiffying up this place, but we'll get it done.
That was a long PS, but I couldn't really fit it in the tone of the rest of the post. So, thanks again for reading!
~Spooky
Various Happenings: https://www.varioushappenings.com/
The Adventures of Clara Cosmos: https://www.claracosmos.space/
SubscribeStar: https://subscribestar.adult/foxsaliant