[Important Note] The Future of my Manga Project / This Patreon Site

My dear supporters,

first of all I would like to thank you for sticking by me for so long. Thanks to your many years of support over the past months and years, it has been possible for me to continue working on my personal art projects.

Since I will be moving soon, I would like to take this opportunity to address something very important about the future of my project that will feel like a new beginning for me and perhaps for all of you too.

As you may have noticed, the last manga page update of my prologue chapter for my main series Erlmaiden Discordia was a while ago.

To make it clear right at the beginning: I haven't thrown in the towel on continuing the story yet. I'm still working full steam on the first chapter and plan to present it in the near future.

With my move, however, there will be some new plans for this site that I'd like to elaborate on, as I've spent a lot of time over the past few months thinking about how I want to continue my career as a freelance manga writer and illustrator, and how I can create a synergy with all my other work and tasks that will also benefit the perception of my branding as a creator.

I've always considered my manga to be the main product of me and this Patreon page, but at some point I felt that somehow I wasn't selling and presenting myself at my best while this project was stuck in the early stages for years for various reasons on top of that.

This prologue became my heart's project, my baby, which I wanted to deliver as a perfect product and which I kept improving. In the process, my additional tasks and freelance activities, which I had to keep track of to make a living, came into strong conflict with my somewhat extreme perfectionism. I felt like I was getting more and more in my own way and not showing off my strengths, creativity, and the dedication I was putting into my projects. Since the prologue is quite a large page count and the setting and whole story is pretty complex to begin with, I realized that it was becoming difficult to clear my head for this work due to my current situation. I felt that I didn't deliver what I mainly wanted to pitch on this website, I didn't deliver the product I "promised".

My unstable situation and unsteady schedule are immutable parameters that work against my original workflow for my prologue. I felt that it was very difficult to generate new interest in the chapter with the very small number of chapter pages so far, while at the same time the project was not progressing. Bad PR, so to speak.

New approaches

After careful consideration, I finally came to the conclusion that I need to change the rails and my entire presentation. So I came up with the following ambitious plan for the coming weeks and months:

• I'm going to hold off on my prologue for now and redefine my Patreon content by focusing mainly on my artwork in general.
• It also means I want to try a new approach to my stories. I already have so many scenes and stories and even whole story arcs for the parts in-between in my head, even clearly defined and written down, more fleshed out than my first chapter. I have endless interesting characters in my bag, but they've all had to wait years to appear, and I've always been very frustrated that I never got past the point where I could show them off. So rather than endlessly trying to start my prologue from scratch, I plan to present lots of short stories and one-shot scenes in my own timeline with various POVs who would normally just be side characters in my "main" storyline.
• That would make it easier to establish and introduce all my other OCs step by step. I can even convey a lot of storytelling through single scene artwork, which can give enough impressions about my characters, I think. I thought my output so far has clearly shown that I really enjoy drawing simple scenes and portraying characters in all kinds of situations. I have built up a lot of anxiety over the years by holding back my huge list full of OCs that I created from the beginning, and now I'm hoping that this new strategy can help my characters finally come to life.
• To make that clearer, I'm also going to redefine the content and goals of my patron site so that new interested users and readers don't necessarily think the whole project revolves around a single manga or stringent storyline. 
• I want to try a new workflow for new character arcs and stories that doesn't clash with my tight time budget and unstable personal situation. There are a few things already in the works. Sometimes I will present a short story that's less than 10 pages, sometimes several connected stories, and mostly just short scenes or single illustrations. I want to tell the different aspects of my world in different ways, and there's potential for other storytelling methods that I'm still working out. 

I hope that these new approaches can help to create a great synergy between all my projects, and that they will put my OCs and my vision of worldbuilding in a new light. You may even have noticed that I've already shown some of my "new" OCs in my last few posts.

Whew, that was a bit lengthy and perhaps a bit more complicated to explain than it will actually turn out to be. In any case, I hope you can understand my new approach to some extent and have faith in my vision again.  I'm more motivated than I've been in a long time because I feel like it can really work. I look forward to sharing more insights into my OCs and more stories from my world with you soon.