Alright! Well, now that things are clear, I've got a lot more control and it's smooth sailing from here we can hope. From now on, I'm going to do my best not to let things pile up again, and we're going to take everything in little chunks, one week at a time. From here on out, we're not rushing to catch up, after all, we're guiding where this goes!
So what's going on? You can check the schedule on-site to figure it out!
My vacation's done, more or less. To be fair, it wasn't much of one and I could have probably relaxed a bit more, but without all the weight on my shoulders I was very eager to just... do whatever. It was very fun at least and I did enjoy myself, though with the sixty-six hours of overtime I've accrued since my last bout of sickness, I should probably take it a little easy now and again.
Still, the plan is mostly the same as I remarked last week, with one or two changes.
Repeating last week a bit, 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 be gathering up a list of items from between the streams for Scream Stream '23 (2023-10-31) and last week's stream (2023-09-20). I'll be running them just like Sketch on the Spot, with a rotating list and I'll be prorating each piece based on how much work it takes to wrap them up (the maximum charge being $40 USD for pure black and white sketch lines to a finished colored sketch.) I will try and 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 the streams, we'll be 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. We'll be posting whenever we have something, and the goal is one comic a week alternating between the two, until I build up enough of a buffer to run them each once a week.
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 have decided to change my plans, and move the specials to the Discount Bin, instead running my standards as a list based thing much like Sketch on the Spot. Basically how that will work, is I will decide on a stream day if I want to take a commission or two and check the list based on who is ready. Then ask them what they want and we'll go from there with regular ala carte pricing. My hope is that taking them one at a time and working on them then and there will end up with me not building up a huge backlog of stuff, and will allow me to keep things fresh and gauge how I'm feeling so that I can pull back if I'm getting too burnt out or take on more if my energy is high or I need the cash.
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 still going to be a bit pickier, but hopefully this will keep things from getting overwhelming.
Once the SotS Clean-Up is finished, 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. As I said last time, 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 from here on out.
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! Again, I'm mostly going to be trying to keep my commission load reasonable and keep my income balanced against overworking myself.
We'll see how it goes, but it can only get better from here.
Thanks again for reading, and I'll see y'all next week!
~Spooky