Let's talk - November (Patreon)

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A whole while back I talked about storytelling. Ever since then I have been making an attempt at improving this. Mainly with series like Defiant Growth and The Girl Nextdoor. Now in my eyes I’m still not there. But I’ve been writing a lot of stories, most of which will probably never see the light of day, but some if which are in my eyes definitely an improvement.

Now one thing that I’ve noticed, is that any bigger storyline I want to tell essentially leads to anywhere between 300-600 pages. Honestly, a story like The Family of Amazons isn’t much different in length than Defiant Growth or Alt Amazon, it’s just in one continuous form rather than chapters.

Which got me thinking a little. The reason that I do stories in chapters is so that I can better structure them and in between chapters have a chance to ask for feedback. While the grand, overarching story is always already written when the first episode starts, details might change or the story might evolve. Or even more importantly, you guys might not enjoy the story at all. It is also why I do polls even in between chapters of certain stories. If you guys like other ideas better, I’d gladly make those instead. Whenever I make a poll, I make sure that I’ll enjoy making any of the options you guys choose. Sure, I might be more excited for one story than the other, but I definitely enjoy making all options. I suck at making things I don’t enjoy making.

Now the second thing I do is spreading out these chapters into parts, 10 or 20 pages every week. There have been some very rightful concerns about this approach in the comments every now and then. About cliffhangers and the lack of progress and having to wait weeks for a story to complete. I fully understand these concerns and agree with them.

Now essentially it’s a weigh of against variation and speed. Now I make two regular comics, one ten pages one twenty pages, one futa comic of ten pages and the X of Amazon larger comics with ten pages a week as well. In my eyes, this provides a lot of variation in the content provided on a weekly basis, though it doesn’t do so on a longer timescale. To create a full 80/100 page story from 10 pages a week it takes two months to do so, which is without a doubt a long time. With 20 pages a week this already halves of course.

Now I see several options for this, but all of them have upsides and downsides.  I’d also like your input in this, so we’ll have a poll below!

Option #1: Continue as is, ten pages Monday, ten pages Wednesday, ten pages Thursday and twenty pages Friday.

Option #2: One comic a week done on Friday. I should also provide some context for this option. I currently make 50 pages a week minimum, so 200 a month at a minimum. Now when translating this to 100 page comics, this would mean two comics a month, not four as would be implied by having a comic every Friday as this option does. So in this case, I can’t say with certainty that these would be 80-100 page comics every Friday. It might even be every other Friday or three a month. I’d say it’s essentially double the workload but this would also be false. When making a story with the same characters and same scenes I would spend less time creating new characters and scenes, being solely focused on one story. If this option turns out to have a large preference, I will give it a sincere try to see how it works for me. But we will definitely see less activity throughout the week, with more content being focused towards the Friday. On the other hand I feel this could be a nice compromise on variety as long as I do not focus around only one series. For example only making two comics maximum of a certain series in a certain month.

Option #3: We take an in between road. 20 pages on Monday, 20 pages on Wednesday, 20 pages on Friday. We will have slightly less variety than usual, but the stories will progress slightly quicker. I do not know what the content outside of these three days will look like until the dust settles, but I do think there will be the occasional extra comic/meme/pin-up set/animation. If there is a large preference for this the “X of Amazon” series will probably eventually translate into chaptered stories as well. I think I will stick with one day for Futa and two days for non-Futa stories.

Now I’m not even going to suggest an option for ten pages every day, because in my eyes it’s the worst option of all. Sure, slightly more variety, but stories will take even longer to wrap up. Which is the whole initial grievance with the current system in place of course.

Now don’t get me wrong, if this poll say gets 40% votes for one option and 30% for the other two I’m not going to throw everything around. If anything it’s just a way for me to get a general idea about what people prefer. Would you rather have a full comic at the end of the week? Or more variety of comics being completed in parallel? But slightly quicker than now? Or are you happy with how it is now? Please vote below!

Due to real life side progress on bigger projects has been slow, but I definitely intend to pick these up again soon!