That Post-Christmas Hangover
What time is it and why?
You know that feeling, you’ve spent the last month getting ready to watch the kids and family members open their stuff and it’s over in an hour. All that Christmas music is cringe. The lights are gaudy and silly. The food is all in Tupperware in the fridge. Now what? You aren’t back at work yet. The kids are out of school till after New Years. It’s that void of time where nothing important is happening and you feel the need to fill it with some kind of productivity.
This is the time of year when I have the chance to sit and think about projects for the year. Do I want to finish this story or that one? Do I want to start something totally new? I’ll come up with an outline or two to store away for later. Sometimes I spool up a business plan for something wildly unsustainable. And in some years I’ll just spend the time cleaning up wrapping paper and boxes for five days.
As much as I would like to do the whole “End of Year” recap post like everyone else, I don’t have anything to show for the year. And even though I have posted about works in progress, they are still in the same state they were in before starting my contract work over the summer. Doing things as a hobby with the potential for income is a long game.
More than likely I’ll spend the next few days sorting through old project stuff, renaming twitter accounts, turning off renewals for domain names, logging into and changing the passwords for my three dozen email accounts. You know, normal people things. By the off chance any one project takes off I already have the domain, twitter, and email ready to go. And when one doesn’t work out its account gets recycled :D.
As for any other stuff going on, as much as I would love to do a generative art project and such I just don’t think I can handle one. Making the art and getting it set up for mint is the easy part. It’s maintaining the “community” and the “floor price” of the items that becomes an impossible task. So many little start up projects that are still going strong with daily updates and the founders still around and all are still down by a ton. Bear market aside, I don’t want people mad at me because they spent $50 on a picture that ends up worth $5 a year later.
I can’t keep up with a writing schedule much less maintain a group of 2-10k supporters who expect a return on their investment. I’m also ETH broke right now like most folks at this point I figure. At least people don’t make fun of me for writing (that I know of). I’d feel just as bad if I asked people to pay $5 a month to read my Substack and it all came crashing down.
For example, If I did a Kickstarter for a manga idea I’ve had for a while the tiers would offer users physical copies of the comic, stickers, shirts, whatever. I would just need to be able to deliver on the product within the couple of months it takes to finalize the production process. If I started an NFT project where every user who mints a pfp gets to burn it in exchange for the physical book I’d still need to be able to deliver on that in a reasonable time frame. If I went totally bonkers and created a new Substack for the comic and offered a subscription that gave each person a physical copy every quarter or so… I’d need to be able to deliver on that product.
After all these years “being able to deliver on the product” has been my main issue. Every time. With every project I’ve started. So maybe that’s my new years resolution or whatever, finish something to sell to people. I mean, I did it once with Redbriar I should be able to do it again right?
Anyway, I hope yall had/have a great holiday break and if you’re kids are eating sour patch kids and cookies for breakfast you aren’t alone.