What I know is that it's going to be completely impossible to get all the things done I want to get done. At least all at once. Doing all my projects at once is going to drive me crazy, it definitely is. Today, I was going to try to start booking all my collaborators months in advance so we could reasonably expect when things might begin, when they might end... but last night, no, I had to put my foot down, I had to admit that I need to cut back, I have to cut the whole thing back to just one project.
But that's impossible, I don't believe for one second that I can do it. Everything I've narrowed down recently to being "high priority", eight projects... Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices, Irregular Fantasy, Iris, Some Sweet Kind of Vampire, Luno Canyon, Kingdom Butts, Better Yet, The Trivia Box, these are all projects that absolutely have to happen right now, I can't possibly pick even one to stop working on, much less one to be the only one I'm working on.
If I was going to pick one, it would be The Choices, because that's the one that's definitely in progress, but how can I abandon any of the others for even a moment? Irregular Fantasy, I at least want the proof-of-concept done by the 20th anniversary of the comic... that's in two years, but animation is difficult and at the moment I have absolutely no resources for animation, so working on it is a bit urgent. Iris and SSKV, been dreaming about them for ten years, want them to quit being a dream, similar situation with Kingdom Butts, this need for a Kingdom Hearts parody has been burning inside me for ages. Luno Canyon and Better Yet, those are not mine, those are the ambitions of other people and I have to help them get off the ground. And The Trivia Box, people are counting on me to bring that to the community.
And that's just the stuff that's high-priority to get out. What about the stuff I've got that's already out that I need to continue -- the podcast used to be weekly, but I've been barely managing to get one out every month. Retrospectives on Disney television series, playthroughs of my favorite video games, it's been nearly a year since any of those were updated. How pitiful is that? I'm so utterly non-functional as a human that I can't even muster the mental fortitude to do the things I love to do. And Zoom meetings for collaborative gaming videos and movie reactions, I've been completely burned out ever since I realized how very much more software I need than just Zoom to get it accomplished, it's too much for me to handle, I don't have the brains to set these things up properly.
Oh, and did I mention I don't have a job. I've had five months of absolute free time and accomplished nothing creatively. That can't last much longer. I need to work. At the beginning of this year, I'd hoped that being back to work would be stimulating enough for my mind that I would get a creative boost... I was so wrong. Those months I was at work, my art completely went away. I'm trying so hard to bring it back.
Something's gotta give, something on my to-do list, many things on my to-do list, have got! To! Go! But how? I can't even imagine. Someone... someone help me. Someone tell me how this is possible.
I have to remind myself, you know, I'm trying to build a Rooster Teeth kind of brand here. But for ten years, they did nothing but Red vs. Blue. Ten years of just one project before they started their second one, RWBY. And seven years later, when those two projects had expanded to six, they proved that making six animated series all at once was overextending themselves, they were forced to put everything on hiatus except for their breakout hits, the first two. And they're a sizeable, revenue-generating TimeWarner company. I'm just me, me and maybe 20 other people, who I'm so grateful for, people who want to see my dream come true, but none of whom reliably have the free time in their lives to actually contribute such big things to such big projects. My vision, going back as far as I can remember, of a bunch of my friends from all corners of my life getting together to swap ideas and make things, it's never going to be that easy.
Let's see, other things making me anxious? Well, I'm probably overthinking things a bit, but I do have to start thinking about generating revenue. There's a couple of projects, namely Choices and Iris, plus a few not currently marked as high-priority, that I plan to have nudity in them, we're talking women's nipples, and that'll mean I'll have to set my Patreon and stuff to being 18+, thus making it harder to find, even if the majority of TAPAS projects don't have nudity... and yes, it's necessary for those stories to have nudity in them, the goal is to normalize women's nipples. Free them, if you will. Not denying that breasts are sexual, but you know, so are legs and necks and lips and noses, they don't have to be inherently sexual, they certainly don't have to be inappropriate, you follow me? They shouldn't be 18+. Gotta make my statement.
Then there's the fact that my Patreon is, indeed, my Patreon, it is a "Sage Mann" Patreon. I don't intend this endeavor to be a "me" endeavor, I'm creating TAPAS here, but in order to honestly produce a "TAPAS" Patreon, to have my projects end with "copyright TAPAS and Stuff Productions", well, I first have to found it as a legitimate LLC. Filling out forms of any kind is so overwhelming and brain-scrambling for me, I don't know how to found a company or keep it alive; TAPAS has been generating a steady 86 cents a month for the past two years. Maybe if I'd managed to keep up with my content generation it'd be doing better by now, or maybe not. Ultimately, I don't know how I'm gonna generate the money I need to survive and keep people on board TAPAS.
Overall? Thinking back to how I used to be a special kid. Then I turned maybe 12 or 13 and I lost it all. Been in a depressed haze ever since, and everything that made me special has left me, little by little. Finishing a story by myself isn't possible anymore, even if I wanted to work by myself. Visual arts and music, they've completely left me in recent years, I used to be so good, but there's not a single note left in me, not a single stroke of a pen. I'm finally old enough that I no longer have to merely dream about creating things, I can actually try... but I've lost so much of my talent. I still have a small shred of writing left in me, and... maybe I can still perform? It's been so long since I've tried.
Anyway, yeah... like I said, this blog post is to take the place of my Saturday check-in. So, looking for advice on how to proceed.
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