I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I would not be here without your support and help. <3

I need to vent and talk to you about some things because I've been drawing for years and I feel like I'm standing still. I know I've been drawing comics, but my progress is just embarrassing. I've stopped or given up on comics more often than I've finished them. I've seen other artists do several comics a year, and I'm struggling to get Zippers Season 2 going. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just wasting time playing COD or anything like that, lol. I draw ALL the time, non-stop. But where is my progress? The problem is that I'm trying to work on everything all the time, which means I'm not making much progress on anything. It could be just me, but I see the result of this method, the comics hardly progress, my ideas rarely get drawn or innovated.

Like I said, I'm always working on a little bit of everything, but why? Quite simply, I feel anxious and often paranoid about not being able to accomplish anything. I stress about not being able to do everything, I overwork myself, and when I don't meet my self-imposed goal, I feel bad about myself and get depressed, and it becomes a negative feedback loop that just turns into a big ball of anxiety. I admit that sometimes I bite off more than I can chew. All of this combined with my really bad time management skills and ADHD (yes, I've been diagnosed) makes it so that no matter if I draw 12 hours a day, every day, I make little to no progress on any single thing. Because I'm often working on 6 or 8 different images at the same time. I've been streaming, I'm sure some have noticed that I had a little countdown window in my old streams. Yes, that was to help me keep track of time, it unknowingly made my timing problem worse.

I'll be honest, I was really frustrated with myself, how come these artists get so much done and I struggle to finish anything. That was the question for me and I couldn't find an answer. Every schedule, every method just failed. The cycle starts like this, I make a schedule, I put time and effort into planning how long and what to draw, I start the schedule as planned, an unknown event happens, I struggle to keep the planned schedule, I give up on the schedule, I make myself feel like shit about it, wash, rinse and repeat. After really trying this year and months of trying to fix this problem, I have come to a conclusion... I'm insane.

Insane in the sense that I keep trying the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. I've been making the same mistake that Disney, Hollywood, and most video game companies make all the time. I was trying to please everybody. I didn't see it before because I honestly didn't think that the core of how I worked was the problem, which was to draw a little bit of everything and hope to get something done. It didn't matter if I worked myself to exhaustion or artblocked myself. A little over a week ago, I was in the shower, thinking about why I can't be as productive as other artists, why I make clients wait forever for their commissions, I draw all the time, I know I'm fast, I know I could finish their commissions in a day. Then it hit me, what I said above, I was trying to do the same thing over and over again with the same result.

Around my last birthday I had a cold and it was terrible. Instead of feeling lazy and useless, I started drawing. Since I was sick, I said fuck it and draw one thing for as long as I was sick. I was working on Suit Printer at the time, only about... 3 pages actually inked and about 15 pages gestured sketched, thanks to some sporadic work since I started the comic. (Mind you, I gesture sketched the first 6 pages on my way back from ANE 2023, in January of 2023). I was sick around my birthday and worked on Suit Printer the first week of October, it went from having only 3 pages partially inked and about 15 of gesture sketches to 20 inked pages in just 5 days. Another week of work and I could have finished the whole comic. So, after this epiphany, I am going to change the way I do things starting this week.

I will dedicate whole weeks to just one project, I know it sounds counterproductive, but my mind is wired to feel good when I get something done and see progress. I won't be able to make everyone happy, but as I've seen and you've seen time and time again... it never works. As the Buddist saying goes: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.."