The Assembly Line
So I have this problem. It's a brain thing, likely an executive dysfunction thing, but I get a lot of project concepts and I generally know what I need to do to get it done but I have difficulty seeing it all the way through. I either don't start them at all or I start them and they loose steam, or I start them and I get stuck and never pick them up again. Either way, I have this problem very often, it manifests in things that aren't just projects either, just any sort of task that seems like it has no clear end in sight. To be clear, 'motivation' is absolutely not the problem, it's the fact that I don't have a clear assembly line to get from point A to point B and I don't always know what to do about that. To clarify for the sake of this post when I say Assembly Line I mean for me the very clear and specific form of events I need to take with each step to get to my goal. This informs me about what I need to get the task done, provides a good framework on how long it might take, helps me keep track of how close I am to being done, and gives me clear stopping points so that I know where I can leave it safely and exactly how to pick it back up.
This is why when it comes to commissions, any time anyone asks me for something that is outside of my scope, that isn't part of my current offerings, that doesn't have a clearly fleshed out 'assembly line' on my end, I flounder. For one, things that do not have an 'assembly line' will take me twice as long as things that do, because I haven't learned the most efficient way of doing things or where my stopping point is. For the second, because of that extra time, I will always charge less than the time it took me so I'm eventually running over my allotted time and funds that I expected it to cover. This leads to me floundering even more and in worse cases, shutting down. Every single time I have taken a piece outside of my 'assembly line', even if I finished it and liked the outcome, I have regretted it due to how taxing it was to get to that point.
All this to say, I need to plot out what I need to get from point A to point B and I'm going to babble on some things I want to work out, spell out what I need to accomplish that and hopefully in just 'talking out loud' I'll find some solutions so that my brain clicks into a point that says 'oh yeah this is feasible' and eventually makes tasks less daunting.
First and foremost the shadow over my whole life that's been the big thing I've always wanted to do:
Goal - Comics
What does this mean? It means I want to make comics for 3 primary stories in my work. I might do small short stories here and there but the 3 main stories are the goal.
What do I need? A script. Nothing exists without a script. I also thought I needed physical paper and tools and while I would prefer that, the fact that I've been 'waiting' for that for so long means I've been holding myself back. This has been to my detriment. I've had a recent breakthrough with a 'rendering' that is readable and isn't too intensive the second step is hopefully getting this simplified style down so that I take less time drawing the shapes I need to get the point across.
How do I accomplish this? Gotta bunker down and write more. I've been getting flickers of scenes in my head and I've not been writing them down as diligently as I should. I avoided it a lot because I was stuck so much on the start that it held me back for years. Now that I'm trying to accept to myself that I need to just do whatever but I'm still not focusing on it. As for the style I need to work on re-trying what I did in the past and then drawing it consistently. If it works it should make the actual illustration itself, faster.
What's stopping me? Script wise? I have some unclear ideas about the scope of what I'm working on and I think it's holding me back. I don't think there's a solution for this beyond just forcing myself to get into the headspace of the settings I want to work on more often.
Is there a solution to this? Yes, I need to use the notebook I got for the purpose of thought spewing my roaming thoughts on my story and use it. The more I put myself in the headspace of the world I want to work on the more things will come to me. I can't write what I see unless I point my lens in that direction.
What steps have I made so far? Not enough. My biggest issue is that I haven't set aside time for myself to do this and well.. this is going to be a repeated problem for most of this I think. I can say as many times as I like that I need to 'deal with my insomnia and make a schedule' but that will just make me wait more rather than do more. Schedule is ideal but setting aside time regardless of schedule is what needs to be done. That being said one thing that I worked on recently was trying to find my 'assembly line' for comics. Thumbnail Pages -> Mockup panels all in Design Doll -> Sketch pages. This is the most confident I've ever felt about my process for making a comic page and seeing it through to the end and having a clear start to end process rather than meandering is what has made me think about this for seriously again.
Priority - High. Probably the most important thing in my life.
Goal - Merch
What does this mean? Making designs and concepts explicitly for the purpose of selling product, starting with stickers and moving up.
What do I need? Clear ideas of what exactly I need to make for designs. A mix of both broad and marketable as well as personal.
How do I accomplish this? Do the art, dangit. After that is working on and maintaining a storefront. I've got a Store Envy account set up with InPrint so that part is ready to go when I have the assets. There is no shipping on my end.
What's stopping me? Haven't really given it much thought as to what to make.
Is there a solution to this? Just gotta give myself some time to think about what designs to make. Probably dragons.
What steps have I made towards this so far? I set up the store front, which is good. The rest is just me making the art.
Priority - Low. Passive income would be nice but there's no pressing reason for me to do this. But it's honestly one of the easier to accomplish goals, here.
Goal - Art Space Server
What does this mean? Running a VPS for the expressed purpose of providing a free/low cost option for a small group of artists to allow them the means to make their own site. It also has a front-facing website for artist resources and things.
What do I need? A host, which I have. And a Debian for Dummies and Ubuntu for dummies books might be a really good investment..
How do I accomplish this? First I set up the server which is only partially done. The second part is just working on the forward facing site that I want to make a resource for artists, usual stuffs like rights, assets and things but also pointers on how to make websites.
What's stopping me? The paralyzing fear of venturing into something I have little knowledge of, all the people I know that can help me are too busy for to send streams of questions and floundering while I contend with my own anxiety of working in a non-GUI environment. (despite the fact that they have offered otherwise I still don't want to take up too much of their time) The fear of getting it wrong, because when you get a server wrong you can mess up everything and there's no easy way to see what's fine and what's not. The feeling of having no safety net to undo what I did wrong. I get very lost with text, if I can't see everything all at once in front of me I loose track of what I'm doing, what I need and where things are. And that's before getting into how every time I open a terminal interface I feel like I'm starting at step one all over again and have to work my way back up.
Is there a solution to this? I don't know x_x I feel like I'd feel more at ease if I didn't feel like I would burden someone with endless questions cus then I'd fee like I have SOME sort of safety net? Or rather I wish I had someone that could work on the server with me, so they can look at it and trouble shoot it with me and see things I can't see. Honestly if I had the money I'd hire someone to hold my hand through the setup, and then I'd make a text file of EVERY SINGLE MINUSCULE COMMAND AND STEP I TOOK TO GET THERE because that would make it so much more less daunting in the future. Actually honestly if more documentation listed literally everything like that, I'd find the process less daunting. I also wish I had a monitor I could turn longways so that I could see more text at once. The other thing I need to do is probably some research on a hosting manager to take care of the back-end of managing user accounts and FTP passwords for me because I think that would save me a headache in the long run. As for my issue with terminal interfaces in general, I think there's a way to install a visual GUI interface for my Ubuntu server and then get into that and honestly... that would genuinely make it so much less daunting...
What steps have I made towards this so far? The host is partially set. I have it running and able to host domains and I have mySQL and PHP 7 installed as well as a few modules. But the next thing I need to do is install SSL that I've been freezing on. I'm so afraid to get it wrong and locking myself out of the VPS. Which at least because nothing important is on it, I could just re-install the OS and start over but that feels so daunting as it took so long to get it set up to the point it's already at.
Priority - Medium. I think there's a certain imperative that I get this done, even if only a few people even know I'm working on it.
Goal - CSS Templates
What does this mean? Make website templates like I use to do back in the Old Days
What do I need? Come up with designs for website layouts.
How do I accomplish this? Draw some mockups, make the assets, figure how to go from there.
What's stopping me? Haven't come up with ideas right yet, haven't sat down to do it.
Is there a solution to this? Like much of the others, setting it as a task for the day would be all I need.
What steps have I made towards this so far? A while back I did some research on how to accomplish an old look from the 90's with borders on either side of the window that would work on all monitor sizes which was one layout type I wanted to re-create. Otherwise not much.
Priority Low. There's no pressing need for me to do this, I just wanna. And like the merch, also one of the easier tasks.
Goal - Personal emotes
What does this mean? A set of personalized emotes with my avatar for use in my Discord server
What do I need? Already have the tools I need for it
How do I accomplish this? Setting aside of set of emotions I want to have emotes for. Should make notes of things I don't find the right face for..
What's stopping me? Ever since I got the new comp, I needed to re-install affinity designer but it won't let me install on top of a populated folder?? I mean I could delete it and start over but that alone made me drop the install lol.
Is there a solution to this? Install then open up the program and do it.
What steps have I made towards this so far? I made one emote and then started work on another so the base assets are there.
Priority Medium. It would just be nice to have personal emotes lol.
Goal - Dragon Adopts
What does this mean? Recreating the old-school style email-based application
What do I need? Assets, I need to draw all the dragons at different stages, need to nail down exactly what I want to. I also need to build the website to keep them all in.
How do I accomplish this? Build the website (it'll be hosted on neocities as I kinda want it to be a push to make people get into website 'games' again) make the art.
What's stopping me? Not doing it :U Getting hung up on the multitude of variables and not just making a decision on how to run it. If I just keep the scope small I shouldn't be overwhlemed by things like too many applications.
Is there a solution to this? Decide my plan of attack, stick to it. Give myself hard rules on how often things like clutches happen and how other people can 'breed' their dragons if I decide to go that route.
What steps have I made towards this so far? Nothin' really.
Priority - Low. This is just a fun side-project that I need to make sure not take up too much of my time.
I feel like there's more but at least I spelled out this much for myself.
This is why when it comes to commissions, any time anyone asks me for something that is outside of my scope, that isn't part of my current offerings, that doesn't have a clearly fleshed out 'assembly line' on my end, I flounder. For one, things that do not have an 'assembly line' will take me twice as long as things that do, because I haven't learned the most efficient way of doing things or where my stopping point is. For the second, because of that extra time, I will always charge less than the time it took me so I'm eventually running over my allotted time and funds that I expected it to cover. This leads to me floundering even more and in worse cases, shutting down. Every single time I have taken a piece outside of my 'assembly line', even if I finished it and liked the outcome, I have regretted it due to how taxing it was to get to that point.
All this to say, I need to plot out what I need to get from point A to point B and I'm going to babble on some things I want to work out, spell out what I need to accomplish that and hopefully in just 'talking out loud' I'll find some solutions so that my brain clicks into a point that says 'oh yeah this is feasible' and eventually makes tasks less daunting.
First and foremost the shadow over my whole life that's been the big thing I've always wanted to do:
Goal - Comics
What does this mean? It means I want to make comics for 3 primary stories in my work. I might do small short stories here and there but the 3 main stories are the goal.
What do I need? A script. Nothing exists without a script. I also thought I needed physical paper and tools and while I would prefer that, the fact that I've been 'waiting' for that for so long means I've been holding myself back. This has been to my detriment. I've had a recent breakthrough with a 'rendering' that is readable and isn't too intensive the second step is hopefully getting this simplified style down so that I take less time drawing the shapes I need to get the point across.
How do I accomplish this? Gotta bunker down and write more. I've been getting flickers of scenes in my head and I've not been writing them down as diligently as I should. I avoided it a lot because I was stuck so much on the start that it held me back for years. Now that I'm trying to accept to myself that I need to just do whatever but I'm still not focusing on it. As for the style I need to work on re-trying what I did in the past and then drawing it consistently. If it works it should make the actual illustration itself, faster.
What's stopping me? Script wise? I have some unclear ideas about the scope of what I'm working on and I think it's holding me back. I don't think there's a solution for this beyond just forcing myself to get into the headspace of the settings I want to work on more often.
Is there a solution to this? Yes, I need to use the notebook I got for the purpose of thought spewing my roaming thoughts on my story and use it. The more I put myself in the headspace of the world I want to work on the more things will come to me. I can't write what I see unless I point my lens in that direction.
What steps have I made so far? Not enough. My biggest issue is that I haven't set aside time for myself to do this and well.. this is going to be a repeated problem for most of this I think. I can say as many times as I like that I need to 'deal with my insomnia and make a schedule' but that will just make me wait more rather than do more. Schedule is ideal but setting aside time regardless of schedule is what needs to be done. That being said one thing that I worked on recently was trying to find my 'assembly line' for comics. Thumbnail Pages -> Mockup panels all in Design Doll -> Sketch pages. This is the most confident I've ever felt about my process for making a comic page and seeing it through to the end and having a clear start to end process rather than meandering is what has made me think about this for seriously again.
Priority - High. Probably the most important thing in my life.
Goal - Merch
What does this mean? Making designs and concepts explicitly for the purpose of selling product, starting with stickers and moving up.
What do I need? Clear ideas of what exactly I need to make for designs. A mix of both broad and marketable as well as personal.
How do I accomplish this? Do the art, dangit. After that is working on and maintaining a storefront. I've got a Store Envy account set up with InPrint so that part is ready to go when I have the assets. There is no shipping on my end.
What's stopping me? Haven't really given it much thought as to what to make.
Is there a solution to this? Just gotta give myself some time to think about what designs to make. Probably dragons.
What steps have I made towards this so far? I set up the store front, which is good. The rest is just me making the art.
Priority - Low. Passive income would be nice but there's no pressing reason for me to do this. But it's honestly one of the easier to accomplish goals, here.
Goal - Art Space Server
What does this mean? Running a VPS for the expressed purpose of providing a free/low cost option for a small group of artists to allow them the means to make their own site. It also has a front-facing website for artist resources and things.
What do I need? A host, which I have. And a Debian for Dummies and Ubuntu for dummies books might be a really good investment..
How do I accomplish this? First I set up the server which is only partially done. The second part is just working on the forward facing site that I want to make a resource for artists, usual stuffs like rights, assets and things but also pointers on how to make websites.
What's stopping me? The paralyzing fear of venturing into something I have little knowledge of, all the people I know that can help me are too busy for to send streams of questions and floundering while I contend with my own anxiety of working in a non-GUI environment. (despite the fact that they have offered otherwise I still don't want to take up too much of their time) The fear of getting it wrong, because when you get a server wrong you can mess up everything and there's no easy way to see what's fine and what's not. The feeling of having no safety net to undo what I did wrong. I get very lost with text, if I can't see everything all at once in front of me I loose track of what I'm doing, what I need and where things are. And that's before getting into how every time I open a terminal interface I feel like I'm starting at step one all over again and have to work my way back up.
Is there a solution to this? I don't know x_x I feel like I'd feel more at ease if I didn't feel like I would burden someone with endless questions cus then I'd fee like I have SOME sort of safety net? Or rather I wish I had someone that could work on the server with me, so they can look at it and trouble shoot it with me and see things I can't see. Honestly if I had the money I'd hire someone to hold my hand through the setup, and then I'd make a text file of EVERY SINGLE MINUSCULE COMMAND AND STEP I TOOK TO GET THERE because that would make it so much more less daunting in the future. Actually honestly if more documentation listed literally everything like that, I'd find the process less daunting. I also wish I had a monitor I could turn longways so that I could see more text at once. The other thing I need to do is probably some research on a hosting manager to take care of the back-end of managing user accounts and FTP passwords for me because I think that would save me a headache in the long run. As for my issue with terminal interfaces in general, I think there's a way to install a visual GUI interface for my Ubuntu server and then get into that and honestly... that would genuinely make it so much less daunting...
What steps have I made towards this so far? The host is partially set. I have it running and able to host domains and I have mySQL and PHP 7 installed as well as a few modules. But the next thing I need to do is install SSL that I've been freezing on. I'm so afraid to get it wrong and locking myself out of the VPS. Which at least because nothing important is on it, I could just re-install the OS and start over but that feels so daunting as it took so long to get it set up to the point it's already at.
Priority - Medium. I think there's a certain imperative that I get this done, even if only a few people even know I'm working on it.
Goal - CSS Templates
What does this mean? Make website templates like I use to do back in the Old Days
What do I need? Come up with designs for website layouts.
How do I accomplish this? Draw some mockups, make the assets, figure how to go from there.
What's stopping me? Haven't come up with ideas right yet, haven't sat down to do it.
Is there a solution to this? Like much of the others, setting it as a task for the day would be all I need.
What steps have I made towards this so far? A while back I did some research on how to accomplish an old look from the 90's with borders on either side of the window that would work on all monitor sizes which was one layout type I wanted to re-create. Otherwise not much.
Priority Low. There's no pressing need for me to do this, I just wanna. And like the merch, also one of the easier tasks.
Goal - Personal emotes
What does this mean? A set of personalized emotes with my avatar for use in my Discord server
What do I need? Already have the tools I need for it
How do I accomplish this? Setting aside of set of emotions I want to have emotes for. Should make notes of things I don't find the right face for..
What's stopping me? Ever since I got the new comp, I needed to re-install affinity designer but it won't let me install on top of a populated folder?? I mean I could delete it and start over but that alone made me drop the install lol.
Is there a solution to this? Install then open up the program and do it.
What steps have I made towards this so far? I made one emote and then started work on another so the base assets are there.
Priority Medium. It would just be nice to have personal emotes lol.
Goal - Dragon Adopts
What does this mean? Recreating the old-school style email-based application
What do I need? Assets, I need to draw all the dragons at different stages, need to nail down exactly what I want to. I also need to build the website to keep them all in.
How do I accomplish this? Build the website (it'll be hosted on neocities as I kinda want it to be a push to make people get into website 'games' again) make the art.
What's stopping me? Not doing it :U Getting hung up on the multitude of variables and not just making a decision on how to run it. If I just keep the scope small I shouldn't be overwhlemed by things like too many applications.
Is there a solution to this? Decide my plan of attack, stick to it. Give myself hard rules on how often things like clutches happen and how other people can 'breed' their dragons if I decide to go that route.
What steps have I made towards this so far? Nothin' really.
Priority - Low. This is just a fun side-project that I need to make sure not take up too much of my time.
I feel like there's more but at least I spelled out this much for myself.