Work Life Rebalancing (Patch ver 1.0)

Cute title right?

I've been creating a lot of content this year, and it's been going great. I had a huge creative block the previous year and it felt wonderful to care about things again and have ideas to share with people. And what's more, my channel is approaching it's 18th anniversary in October and still growing. That's truly incredible and I want to thank all of you for watching me for however long you've been here.

Now! In the last month or so, the pace I have been putting out work has caught up with me. The initial momentum could only get me so far, and years of experience have taught me that my brain and body have limits and need to be maintained in order to keep functioning. I'm fortunate to have an audience that understands these limits and wouldn't want me to produce art at the expense of myself. Even when I first introduced the bonus videos, most of the feedback I got was that it was exciting as long as I wasn't overdoing it.

I have gotten extremely efficient at producing the bonus content. It has a turn around time of about 2 days of work. So thankfully it alone is not taxing to produce. However, the recent burnout wall I have hit has reminded me that even if it only takes 2 days, I have about 7 days total in a month where I am not working my day job to devote to creating content if I work in regular breaks and don't overlap the two jobs. Switching tasks constantly throughout the day actually wears me out significantly faster than just doing one job for as many hours as I have been. And unfortunately my day job is very necessary in order to continue living my current lifestyle.

So I am re-calibrating the pace at which I am putting out content in order to keep it sustainable and enjoyable. No one wants me to dump out content with a half working brain. And I am too excited about how things have been going to fully quit. So here are the changes I have worked out going forward to help me accomplish this:

• 1. Bonus content will now be on an every other month schedule. It's not getting dropped entirely, but it is not going to come out every single month. I will record the video that was chosen for September's poll in October and post it towards the end of the month. I have drafted a production schedule and this will be a test run to see how well bonus videos fit into it.

• 2. The Feral Woman videos are going to be limited in production to 1.5 days of filming. I have each month found that I have wanted to go back and film additional days once I start editing. Now I will be stricter with myself and draw the line about how much time I am devoting to filming. This may reduce the length ultimately to 45 minutes on average.

• 3. 7 work days a month is not enough time to make a Feral Woman video AND continue long term goals like essays. There will be some months where I will need to take breaks from uploading main channel content in order to devote more uninterrupted time to the writing and editing process.

I have been considering in light of this that I may want to switch to monthly billing rather than per video billing in order to financially allow me to take the time to work on longer videos. Feedback is welcome on how this may impact you. Functionally since I have been uploading every month, you will be paying the same amount to support as you have this year if the switch to monthly is made, the date you are billed may change and you have the option of signing up for yearly rates as well which I can set up to give you a % discount (to be determined at a future time). I can also pause, refund yearly subscriptions or change the membership back to per video if I in the future go on another prolonged hiatus from content. I hope that my transparency and track record of running my Patreon fairly will give people confidence in me.

Thanks for reading all this and I appreciate the support as I work this all out!