The Dramatic Return

Hey, manticores!

(buckle up friends, this is gonna be a long post, please read it all)

Before anything else: THANK YOU for sticking with my Patreon these past few months. I've been going through stuff and it's extremely encouraging to know that people have been sticking with me. ❤

I'll be completely honest, my hard drive breaking in June completely destroyed my brain for making "actual content" for about six months. I've done a series of simple TikToks, made occasional memes and goofs on social media, and very slowly rebuilt some of the things I lost with the drive, but it's been kinda rough from a "consistent creation" standpoint.

Because of this, as I'm sure you've noticed, this page has been quiet for a while. The last update to this page was in [checks notes] September, and this page has been on an awkward unofficial anxiety-induced hiatus since then.

This is bad for a fun variety of reasons, the two most important being, obviously, that A: I enjoy making Patreon content, and, more importantly, 2: I know my beloved manticores love getting stuff that they paid for.

I've been a little paralyzed by anxiety about this page for the past couple of months, partially because I've been unsure as to how to proceed with it. I really want to get back to doing stuff here, but I'm currently five months or more backed up on posting here, and I'm worried about getting stuck or blocked up on working through the backlog.

Then, today, I realised that, obviously, I had someone I could directly ask for advice about this situation:

You!

So, here's the situation.

The current full list of available perks for patrons here includes all of the following:

• Patreon-exclusive posts for everyone
• Behind-the-scenes content for everyone
• Name in the credits for everyone
• Wallpapers and early access to videos for Cubs and up
• Monthly art, voting for video topics, and an animated name in the credits for Manticores and up
• Exclusive tutorials, personal video-style portraits, and name spoken in credits for Elders and up
• Character voice lines and portraits shown in credits for Legendaries and up

Now, you might notice some wonky edges on this list, and that's not great:

• Behind-the-scenes content, any "name in credits" perks, early access to videos, and voting for topics have, of course, been direct casualties of the lack of videos.
• Patreon-exclusive posts and wallpapers have been indirectly affected, since it's hard for me to make posts and wallpapers when I don't have primary content to draw on.
• Personal portraits and character voice lines haven't been an issue during the hiatus since I didn't get any new patrons between August and November.
• That leaves monthly art and tutorials.

Tutorials are slow-going (extremely slow-going, to be completely honest) but I've been planning on doing more of them. I've got some ideas for some small animationy tutorialy tips and things.

If you're an eagle-eyed viewer with consistent high rolls in Perception checks, or if you have eyes, you may notice that "Monthly Art" has never occurred. That's... not good. 

It was a part of the original plan dating way back to over a year ago, but for some reason that perk never actually got off the ground -- at first, when I was doing more complex and "artistic" wallpapers, I think I had trouble differentiating in my mind between what counted as a "wallpaper" vs what would be an "art". The thing is, with the current wallpaper style, it's much easier for me to wrap my head around having Patreon-exclusive "art" that's separate from the wallpapers, so I'm trying to work out whether to start doing those in January. (This may be the topic of a future poll)

This leads me to the current poll:

I'm going to start, right away, posting actual stuff on the Patreon again. Said actual stuff is going to definitely include behind-the-scenes stuff for upcoming videos, polls for video topics, and some other miscellaneous stuff -- possibly more discussion-type posts.

The question on the fried tip of my brain is this: 

I am, by my calculations, eight wallpapers behind (two each for August, September, October, and November). I can do all of them, none of them, or half of them, but either way, if I do any, I think I'm going to need to do them spaced out over several months.

So: 

How should I deal with this backlog?