2023-24: The Year I Burned Out

The last post I made on this Patreon was January 2nd, 2024. In that post, I talked about Cultivation Novels and how I was looking forward to talking about them in the next post.

That next post never materialized. A lot of 'next posts' didn't.

The year 2024, and to an even greater extent, the last 6 months of 2023, were some of the most brutal 18 months of my life. It was like a nonstop wall of depression, stress, and a complete deflation of my creative psyche that happened all at once.

In the year 2021, I was brought on to write the script for a game called Andaron Saga. (AKA "AS") I spent the next 2.5 years writing for it, nonstop, month after month, in between all my other writing projects (The Last Precursor until 2022, Cryopod to Hell still writing), in between my work on AI stuff (which started being a major thing at the end of 2022), and in between my other projects, such as maintaining work on the Fire Emblem Resource Repository.

Andaron Saga, over those 2.5 years, broke me. Mentally to a large degree, but especially creatively. It was the first time in my life I'd worked on someone else's project, following their vision while trying to add my own touch. I succeeded in that latter part, I must say, but it all came at a heavy cost.

Over the course of 2.5 years, multiple completely unrealistic full release window 'deadlines' came and went, each of which brought a mountain of stress upon me and made me frantic with anxiety. This anxiety came as a result of my, shall we say, perfectionism. I don't like putting out half-baked things. I don't like half-assing creative projects. Things don't need to be perfect, but I need to feel that when I release them as 'complete', they are in fact complete. Ultimately, I did not feel that way at the time of AS's release.

It's been 1.5 years since the game launched. It was rushed out, and this is most evident in the midgame where the dialogue feels much worse than the rest of the game (because I skipped several chapters entirely) and in the outro to the game, the final scenes after the final chapter, which I had no time to even slightly fix up.

Looking back, just a few more months would have been enough time for me to finish the work to a level I consider acceptable. It's really a shame we didn't get that time, but the past is the past. I can't go back in time and change things, but my perfectionist brain can still replay my regrets over and over until it cripples me with depression. And it has, for over a year.

But a year and a half is a long time. A lot of time passes, those painful feelings eventually fade, dulled by new experiences, new desires, and a new wellspring of creativity.

This post isn't going to be about the past. It's going to be about the future.

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Over the last several years, as a result of taking on, frankly, too many projects, my writing speed has cratered. There have been several times in recent memory where I published only one single Cryopod to Hell chapter in a single week. Just one in a week!

That's genuinely unthinkable to me.

In the past, I would put out a new chapter every 1-2 days. This was normal. It was quite easy for me, as I steadily built up a system of writing future plans in a doc, filling them out as the moment drew closer for big reveals, and filling out the final details on the day-of-writing.

This system hasn't changed, but my mental capacity for creativity has plunged to a dangerous level, and I want to finally address that and fix it in 2025.

Here are all my current projects, in the order of importance I am assigning them. The order of importance determines the priority I give to working on any given project on any given day. If there's a conflict between the two, the higher priority one always takes precedence.

• Real Life Job. My Patreon does not sustain my life at all anymore, so I must prioritize my real life job. Luckily, it's an easy retail job that I don't feel any stress doing, so it's easy to manage.

• Cryopod to Hell. I remain as invested in my main body of work as ever. This is my highest priority, and I'm going to start making more and more time to write more parts faster than in 2024.

• Umi AI stuff. Because of Andaron Saga, I basically abandoned this in '23. At the start of 23, I had to make a choice on which projects I cared the most about, and I 'temporarily' suspended this, but I'm returning to it now with a vengeance. I've already assembled hundreds of files for the next major release of Umi AI, and I'm working on the infrastructure for its next major update. It's gonna be huge.

• Andaron: New Dawn. (AKA "ND") Because of my dissatisfaction in how AS released, I've been working on a total revamp of Andaron Saga in a brand new engine, with me as the head creative, me the head writer, and so on. I have my own team of artists, a musician, coders, and so on. Unfortunately, due to limited time constraints, and the lower prioritization on this list, ND will not be a quick-release project. It's going to take years to complete.

Andaron Saga characters VS New Dawn ones:

All other projects I've set aside. These three, plus my real-life job, are going to take up the bulk of my attention, moving forward.

I've never been good at publishing posts on Patreon. I have stuff I can blog about, but it's always been a bit of a pain, you know? It takes time to write these posts, takes time to get them pushed out to readers, and tbh I'm never sure just how many people actually read them.

But what I HAVE noticed is a huge influx of new 'free' tier members. Over the past six months, I've seen 20-50 people a month signing up! I almost never restrict posts to paid members, so the free ones will get to see everything all the same as the rest.

2025 is going to be a big year.

Not just for me, but for humanity too. Artificial Intelligence is likely to see a huge explosion this year, and I just obtained an RTX 3090 for my PC so I can put AI to greater use in the coming years, as well.

In this year, I want to ramp back up to where I was in 2022, or perhaps even pre-2021 when my output was unstoppable. My real-life job makes it difficult to plan for specific days and events, since I need to put money in the ol' bank account, but now that my apartment complex has a new landlord who isn't a total piece of... work... I don't have to worry about a BS eviction and can continue to live here, saving up money reliably.

Here's to the year 2025, and here's to a New Dawn!