#I'm considering adding two pages to part 1 to fix the problem

[ferronickel]

Looking Glasses Page 68

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What's a shadowshard you say? Why yes, you're right, I probably should have explained that earlier in the comic. Live and learn. The short answer is that they're broken pieces of shadow crystals that can be used to help phones and other technology work in the dark world.

[The comic might take a short break for the upcoming winter holidays. The next pages are pretty complicated and I've got some other work to do as well, so I'll let you know next monday if I need a break.]

[kvalenagle]

It's a chaotic week, and there's no better way to greet a grumpy Wednesday than with this @merteazy Blinky art <3 It's a week of doctor visits and medical tests, which always leaves me grumpy because I can't always get any editing done. Pridelord is mostly through line edits, which are going fairly fast, but I needed to take a break to add in a new Whisper scene. I'll avoid spoilers, but there was a subplot I considered taking on to Saberbeak before finishing it, and when I was doing my line edits, I realized that I had the perfect moment to pay it off right then. It just required a few nudges. Most books don't get scenes added in the line edit phase, but the large ones like Ashen Weald or Crackling Sea had the same thing come up. If you're new to book creation, everyone is a little different, but my novels usually go through the following phases. Story-related ones are slow, the rest can be as fast as a single day or two. 1. I write the book. This is actually the first and second draft. Before I start writing for the day, I read and edit what I wrote yesterday. That helps keep it fresh in my mind. I ran a test early on when it took me an hour to write a thousand words, and I found that if I had just read/edited the last thousand words I wrote, it took about 30 minutes, and the writing went twice as fast. So this turned out to be a 'free' second edit as I went along. 2. I read through it in Scrivener (the most common novelist word processor) and make changes. My goal here is to fix story issues, foreshadowing, etc. 3. I read through it out loud with my spouse. My brain will often leap from A to D, and his brain needs B and C to be there. If I'm reading it out loud, he can tell me what he needs to make sure the logic flows, and I can usually find a way of saying it that works perfectly for me, too. And reading aloud catches some errors that I wouldn't normally find. 4. I hand it off to my developmental editor, Dustin Porta, and my beta readers. These steps used to be separate, but there's a lot of redundancy here. It's also a case where sometimes Dustin has a feeling but we need data from how fans think. A lot of Foultner and Henders scenes get saved here. I'll go through his feedback (~500+ fixes, some bigger than others), and go through beta feedback. Beta reader probably deserves its own post, but the biggest problem with editing isn't finding problems... it's the author editing out the good parts. Beta readers are flagging their favorite bits first, before the mistakes, so I don't delete, say, Cherine from the novel. 5. I print it out and do a line edit myself. This fixes prose, pacing, language, imagery, and echoes. This is about making sure the language compliments the story and doesn't detract from it. 6. It goes off to Tim Marquitz, my copy editor. This is spelling/grammar/etc. He catches the grammar things that're invisible to me. 7. I do a final printed read-through with a green pen (things I want to fix but probably shouldn't so I don't introduce new errors) and red pen (things that if I saw in someone else's book, I'd consider an error, and must fix.) There's usually a proofreader in here, too. You expect to catch 95% errors from each pass. This is often when the Patreon supporters get their ebook version =] Though it gets updated with the release version if typos are found after here. 8. The audiobook narrator, James Scott Spaid, begins recording the book. He'll always catch some things that got past everyone else by virtue of saying them out loud and doing the sound engineering. Once he finishes, I listen through, suggest changes if any come up, and an audio proofreader comes in. Usually once I've listened, Patreons get the audiobook. And during this phase, the final formatting and printed proofs are happening since the page count is finalized even if a typo or two gets fixed. And that's it =] Eight big steps from start to finish. The first steps are by far the slowest because they involve story changes.

[bob-artist]

Hey Bob, I hope your doing ok! I was thinking before (and I don't wanna come off as rude or try to stick my nose in your financial business) what if you brought back the tracking ads? Would that help at all? I'm definitely more concerned about your health and that should come first, but I remember what you said about patrons this month so I was just wondering. (If I'm overstepping my boundaries in anyway u don't have to answer) FEEL BETTER!!

I wasn’t going to answer publicly, but I think I probably should.

Thanks for the message, and don’t worry, you’re not coming off as rude.  Losing the ad money sucks, but it isn’t enough to make or break the comic.  It’s just another financial blow like the many others I’ve been dealt this year.  At least now, unlike before, I can somewhat afford to lose it.

I was unhappy with the ads for awhile.  I don’t trust or approve of the way tech companies handle people’s personal data, so I don’t want to perpetuate something I don’t believe in.  When I first started using Google ads in 2011, it didn’t seem like as big a deal as it has over the past year or two.  But things are different now.  Like, I’ve still seen Cambridge-Analytica-style fake news ads sneak in by being mis-categorized, and I don’t want any part of that. 

The ad situation doesn’t have anything to do with the hiatus.  Part of my need to step back is just my own health.  As of now, and thanks to lots of effort and maintenance, I’ve gone the longest I’ve ever gone since I was 14 without a major chronic health episode - 4 years for something that’s usually at least annual.  But I’ve also felt like I've been hanging by a thread for almost all of the past year.  Minor setbacks are getting increasingly difficult to endure.  Every day is just a struggle to keep things up and running, and to make sure I’m only failing at one or two things a day instead of failing at every single thing (which is what happens during a full-blown episode).  Right now, I need to fail at the comic for a while so I can keep the rest of my life running.

My health issues are the reason I have to be self-employed, and the flexibility of self-employment is the reason I’ve been able to hold off an episode for 4 years.  I’m hoping my readers and patrons will give me the flexibility that my former day job didn’t, but if my readers would rather move onto other things, I can accept that and move onto other things too.  I’ll still be posting creative content to Patreon in the meantime (like I said, I’m trying to only fail at one or two things), but it just won’t necessarily be DOTU stuff.

But there are also some long-term issues with the comic itself that won’t be fixed by a hiatus or by better health.  I’ll put the rest of this under a cut, but you don’t really need to read it.  It’s pretty long.

I’ve been looking at the overall health - and long-term health - of the comic, including stuff like reader and patron retention and engagement since switching to 2 and 3 pages per month.  These things were great at 5 pages per month, but my finances and health weren’t great because I was working literally nonstop at less than minimum wage.  Now that I'm making a better page rate and have more room for good freelance, my finances are better, but growth of the comic is worse.  (I knew this would happen, which is why I always push so hard to get back to faster updates.)

When I get into a scene that no one cares about, it means I have to work for months before I can get back out of that scene, and it’s a motivation killer because I feel like there’s no purpose behind the hours of work I’m pouring in when I can be doing equally unimportant corporate freelance for 5x the pay.  And that also means there’s months-long stretches where readers aren’t excited enough about the comic to want to share it, which also affects growth.  It feels like we’ve been in this state of disinterest ever since the start of chapter 4, which was nearly a year ago.

Pacing is one of the most important things about webcomics.  Without it, it’s impossible to gain momentum.  But I don’t have a working spouse or a lucrative low-effort day job, and I live in an area with one of the highest costs of living in the US, plus I have chronic health stuff.  There are people out there who can live on what I’m currently making on Patreon, but not here in Cook County, and not with my situation.  So there’s a limit to how much comic work I can do.

It feels horrible to know that I’m being given more than the vast majority of self-published non-porn webcomickers on Patreon, and *still* having trouble continuing.  But I can only do what I can afford to do, and if that isn’t enough to maintain the health of the comic, then I need to keep doing my corporate freelance while I think of other alternatives.  Here are some of the things I’m considering:

-Making the comic patrons-only until I have enough of a backlog to post 6 months or 1 year of weekly (or 5x monthly) public pages. (This would mean a public hiatus of like 9 months or more.)

-Working on other projects that provide cross-promotional opportunities, or that, if successful enough, I would do instead of DOTU. (for example, doing more traditionally published novels or a more marketable comic.)  I don’t want to quit DOTU, but if the excitement and buzz around it is gone, then I need to consider other options.

-Putting less effort into DOTU pages so I can finish them faster. (the problem is I’d have to put in a *lot* less effort to make a real difference, and at that point I’d probably be unhappy enough with my work to not want to show it to anyone.)

-Changing DOTU to an illustrated prose format so I’m able to get through the story faster. (This will make a lot of readers drop out, but it’s something I’d consider before ditching the comic entirely)

-Hoping I feel better after the hiatus, and then just continuing as usual until my next existential crisis :/

As with last October, I’m making more from DOTU than I can afford to abruptly lose, so I’ll probably choose the last option for now and make my long-term plans in the background based on how it goes after I start posting again.

[funkymbtifiction]

Thanks for all great the feedback! Speaking generally, what is the strengths/weakness of each type in relation to writing fiction? Personally, I struggle to see my strengths. I do struggle with chronic dissatisfaction. I'm trying to translate a dream/grab a cloud and make it solid. Usually I feel like I get it wrong. At times, I struggle to write cause I know I can't create the perfect the story in my head. It's better to keep it perfect, but that doesn't make me happy. Thanks again.

First, you need to remember this:

Perfect does not exist.

Perfect is an abstract concept.

Define “perfect.” If you do, it equates perfection TO YOU, but not to the rest of the world. Your idea of perfect differs from my idea of perfect. Perfect is an imaginary thing that is never quite you, that is just out of your reach, a goal so intangible that you can never succeed, an ideal which you cannot define – it’s just… perfect. 

Think about it. Can you write the perfect novel? What IS the perfect novel? A novel with no mistakes in it? Well, would that REALLY be perfect? What makes something perfect? Can you ever achieve it? Has anyone ever achieved it? In my opinion, no. You may think your favorite novel is perfect. It isn’t. There’s always some way for anything to be improved.

What happens is, in your striving for perfection, you spend about a thousand more hours making something 1%, 2%, 3% better… when the world, and everyone except the irrational little perfection demon on your shoulder would have been happy with 95% perfect. You can drive yourself insane, trying to live up to a standard that does not even exist.

I know this. I have done it. I have written, and written, and proof-read, and changed, and streamlined, and risked ruining something, because I was always trying harder for perfection, creating problems in my head where there were none on the page, being too ruthlessly critical of myself and my product. Other people read it and tell me, “This is good, but I got confused in paragraph six,” meanwhile I’m thinking, “The characters aren’t deep enough!” Or, “I liked this character, but could you weave him into the plot a little more?” whereas I was worried about the sentence structure in that part of the book.

I read a writing book once, from a very well-known / best-selling author who said she let several friends read a novel once and all of them complained about the exact same thing. She had a choice whether to try and fix it (which would mean hours and hours of work, tearing up and reconstructing chapters to fix it)… or to sell the book to a publisher. She sold it. They published it. And when the reviews first came out, she thought, “Oh, they’re all going to harp on that one flaw.”

None of them did. No one noticed it. No one commented. No one thought it was a big deal. That huge glaring “error” her friends noticed went unnoticed by the world – or at least, enough people for it to catch no air time. She could have spent another six to twelve months fixing that flaw… would it have been a better book? Maybe. But it proved to her that: the world is hard to please, the world really doesn’t care if you spend a thousand hours or twelve thousand hours on a book, and everyone is going to harp on something different, so … a book in your hand is better than a perfect, imaginary book in your head.

Are you an NF type by any chance? They struggle the hardest with wanting to live up to some perfect ‘ideal’ / imaginary potential which is not always grounded in reality. Their intuition feeds them all kinds of paranoid thoughts about their writing ability / plot construction / detail-focus / etc, that trust me, very few other people notice or care about. And the more research you do, the more you can feed those problems.

Here’s a few solutions:

Recognize perfect does not exist. This is a made-up thing by evil goblins to keep you from feeling good about what you write. Screw ‘em.

Do your best. Is it not good enough? Tough. If you did your best, no one can ask anything more of you – including yourself. Writing is a skill enhanced with time and practice. You will be a better writer in ten years than you are right now – but to BECOME that better writer, you have to write right now.

Consciously Improve. I read an excellent article once about how it takes a thousand hours of practice to become an expert at something – but a thousand hours does not mean practicing in general, it means practicing with intent. Let me give you an example: you notice as a writer that you tend to use a lot of adverbs instead of strong verbs. Practicing in general would be continuing to write, but using 10,000 adverbs – as usual. You are teaching yourself nothing, just repeating your old mistakes – and not becoming a better writer. Practicing with intent is continuing to write and training your brain to seek our and supply and use strong verbs instead of adverbs.

Do not seek advice from other perfectionists. Two unreasonable idealists do not make one realist. And do not put ideas into your proof / beta reader’s mind; they will go in looking for that flaw and reaffirm your concerns. Trust me, a fresh pair of eyes will find things wrong you did not think of, and may not consider what you’re worried about as a problem. If you have five beta readers, and they all say something different, you cannot make anything perfect by listening to all of them (unless they all have a point); but if five of them say the exact same thing (”Joe is a poorly developed character…”)… LISTEN.

Set reasonable standards for yourself that conform to good writing (such as: I will proof read it to catch any mistakes, I will not over-use adverbs, I will run it through a grammar checker to see if my sentence structure is good) … and then stick to them. Force yourself to stick to them.

Do not borrow trouble. Do not compare yourself to other writers. Do not envy other writers. Do not read other writers, while working on a project, if you have learned in the past that this triggers your fear / perfectionism and makes you overly hard on yourself. (This is why I read no fiction while writing novels; my Ne likes to play the comparison game and I always come up short.)

Okay, the strengths and weaknesses: (these are SUBJECTIVE… and remember, readers of your own type won’t consider them flaws)

NFs: [weaknesses] too much desire to be perfect / too unrealistic / high of standards which stalls the writing process, a lot of trouble adding in the right amount of description. [strengths] Intuitive understanding of emotional dynamics, able to write compelling characters with complex psychological motives.

NTs: [weaknesses] may have unrealistic / perfectionist tendencies / too high of self-standards, a lot of trouble adding in the right amount of description, and sometimes, flat or emotionless characters. [strengths] Often excellent satirists or comedic writers with zany world approaches and good at jarring the reader from their comfort zone.

SFs: [weaknesses] may use too much detail / descriptions / focus on things that do not drive the plot forward, be fussy about making their story ‘realistic’ and worry their ideas aren’t original enough. [strengths] Terrific at creating realistic, emotionally dynamic characters and world building in ways that make the world seem real (focus on describing actions / events, and noticing everyday things that intuitive writers tend to forget about).

STjs: [weaknesses] may become absorbed in making their stories logical / realistic and focus more on that than emotional connections or growth between characters; may forget to explain motives or clumsily handle emotions or fall into using too much description which slows the plot. [strengths] Excellent at creating realistic, complex, dynamic worlds full of details, often packed with action.

- ENFP Mod