My Sh!t: The Getting Together Of

[the_gneech]

I have been quietly, but nevertheless definitely, going mad for the past few weeks because, like HAL, I feel like I have been given mutually contradictory directives, each of which has priority over the others. I think if the apartment had a pod bay, I would have locked myself out of it by now.

Fortunately, we do not. The closest we have is a back yard overgrown with weeds, and locking myself out of that would at most be an inconvenience until lythandra came home and said, "What are you doing out there, you fathead?"

But my brain has been wrestling with the problem of "You must start bringing in money!" vs. "The only thing I really care about doing is my comic, which does not pay and effectively precludes doing anything else!" Every course of action I've considered has been stymied by this.

• Get a job. Any job. This would make money. But it would prevent making the comic, which is the only thing I really care about. Untenable.


• Write novels. More enjoyable than getting a job. Pay is more likely than with the comic, but hardly guaranteed and certainly not likely to be in the quantities needed. Also, it's not making the comic.


• Run out of money, starve, and get kicked out of the house. Would prevent making the comic.


• Have money magically appear. Good plan! How?


• Uhhh... Yeah, I thought that would shut you up.


• Get paid for making the comic. I earn ~$250/month from Patreon subscribers and maybe $10/month from book sales. To make a living, I would have to increase that twentyfold. How?


• Uhhh... You're really not very good at this.


• Go mad? That's what I've been doing. It's not helping.


• Return to the top of the list and try again, hoping something changes this time. This is just an extension of the "go mad" bullet.

Well, unlike HAL, I can step sideways instead of going up and down the crazyladder again and again, and that's what I'm going to do. At this stage taking action, even if it turns out not to have been the 100% optimal action, is preferable to going around and around in the same rut.

So I'm going to start by signing up for The Oxford Program and going through it in order to find (or at least try to find) some kind of lucrative career that can mean enough to me that I don't feel like I'm throwing away my life just to chase a paycheck.

While that's underway, I'm going to continue getting as much done on my comic projects as I can "on the side," with an emphasis on speeding up my ridonkulously slow production time. Prolific creators are profitable creators. How I'm going to do that is a topic that will require some dedicated thought and is a topic for another post, later. The main thing is going to be focus and deliberate action, if I can figure out some way to develop it.

So, we'll see how it goes, wish me luck. The comic must continue, but money must be made. Those two items, combined, are the victory condition.

-The Gneech