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2023 in Review
2023 in Review
2023 in Review
I’ve decided to do a bit of a reflection of what I wrote this year.
This is going to be fairly ranty at the start, look for the TLDR to skip to the general writing part.
Financially, 2023 was a terrible year for me.
My income stagnated about August last year at the 1500$ I “needed” to hit by that month to hit my self-imposed deadline of when I want to live off this. Then it started to drop, substantially, hitting a low of 1250$ around March. At the same time, inflation happened and I get hit twice by that because I get paid in USD, but I have to pay myself out in Euros. Everything got more expensive and I was falling further and further below the line that I set for myself I had to hit to believe this job had a future for me.
So yeah, that was kinda depressing, not gonna lie. I was fairly close to taking up a side job again and, if the wage fell further, the logical conclusion would have been to quit doing this as my primary income source and go to job hunting. I’m fine with being a low-paid artist, but I won’t turn 30 and be a failed one.
To start with, I did the two things one should do when faced with a problem: introspect and get at it. Introspection (and asking as many of my current readers on Discord as were online during my ranting hours), made it fairly obvious that the issue was twofold. A minor issue was an overabundance of erotic content. Alright, fixed easily enough, lewd wall ended. The major issue, however, was that I was far from the only one having to put on the tighter belt.
Fundamentally, I am the end of the distribution chain. By that I mean that my writing is, by the truest definition, a luxury product. Worse (for me), it’s a luxury product you don’t actually have to pay for. Not only do I put the vast majority of my writing out for free, I also compete with other people that do. I do not loathe this, but it does make for a fairly difficult situation when people are cutting expenses out of their bills. Why would your patronage not be among the first things to cut?
I do not want this to sound accusatory, I’m quite honoured for every cent you give me. I’m just analyzing my situation, or the situation I was in and will likely be in again at some point or another.
Since the major problem was something I could not fix, I am not going to go into politics, I’m too principled for that den of vipers, there was really only one choice.
Work.
When the times get tough, you just have to tough it out. No other choice, really.
Now, the good news is that my finances did ultimately recover… well, before adjusting for inflation. I hope it keeps going up, because I’m about 400 USD away from being in a paygrade that I would regard as “sustainable for a career” rather than “stupid thing men can do in their twenties”.
Me turning scarcely producing hobby writer by the time I hit thirty is a genuine thing that might happen. If you want to prevent that, give me money. Don’t do it out of guilt, do it because I provide a good product. I’m not begging, I’m reminding you that I’m trying to live over here.
And please do read all of this in the voice of the “:P” emoji, I’m not a direly serious person… despite being German. :P
If I was Austrian, the threat of a failed art career might hit harder…
Ah well.
TLDR: I was doing pretty poorly at the start of the year but its fine but its not good.
Now, onto what I actually did this year.
I worked… a lot. By my estimations, I have a 60 hour work week, I take 14 days off a year, during which I also write anyway, and… yeah, that’s what I do with my live. I fucking love it.
This year I published Welldark Volume 2, to generally high praise and good reception.
I started and finished Drip-Fed Season 3, then put that story on hiatus for…
I began the Gamer Early Rewrite. Aforementioned need for cash made it so I pressured Despaxas again on the question whether he would be fine with me publishing my branch elsewhere. Good manners, since he started the story and all that. He did give me the go-ahead, but the early chapters of the Gamer are so utterly terrible that I had to rewrite those to have a clear conscience. So I went ahead and started that….
I hate editing.
I hate editing so much.
We’re getting there though, only about 90 more chapters to go…
I weep…
Anyhow, on a much smaller note, I also wrapped up Deep in Trouble and am almost done with WAKMD. I write this on the 20th and I hope to finish that story up before the end of the year, but I am not hopeful. Probably will be mid-January.
“The hells is a Deep in Trouble? WAKMD?” Many of you may ask.
The answer is debauchery.
Deep in Trouble is a Dice-Rolling Quest that I ran on fiction.live in my spare time. Yes, I take breaks from writing by writing. A Dice-Rolling Quest is a story where the readers decide many of the character actions/worldbuilding and outcomes are largely decided by dice rolls. It’s a fun exercise for someone like me, that usually plans things.
Deep in Trouble suffered from a variety of issues, most of which stemmed from it being my first venture into such a story, and I wrapped it eventually on a pretty “meh” note because I had acquired a bunch of ‘tech debt’. Too long a story to go into.
I replaced it with Hexagons for Master.
Both of those stories are incredibly lewd, because the readers are in charge.
For WAKMD, that’s a WoW fanfic (and the last fanfic I’ll ever write) about Anduin building a stupid large harem of willing sex slaves. It’s just porn. You can find it on Hentai Foundry.
Now, on… request? Recommendation? Of one of my long-time supporters (you know who you are), I started tracking my words written per day this year. The results are… interesting. Again, as of me writing this, I am still 11 days out from the end of the year, but it seems that I have written an average of about 3200 words per day this year, with about 40 days in there where I did not write a single word.
I don’t know how much of those 40 days is my unorthodox sleep schedule “stealing” days from me. I’ll keep an eye on this next year, because that’s an unacceptable amount of wasted time to me. There’s also a few days I just forgot to log.
My buffer remained around the sturdy 20 this entire year. I dipped to around 15 for a little while in February, which was about the month where I considered if I would have to quit. Not the mindset for productivity, as you can imagine. Seasonal depression do be hitting.
Quick explanation for the graph you’re about to see: Blue line is the daily words written, orange line is a 7-day running average, black striped line is my daily wordcount goal (3500 words), and blue dotted line is the trend line, calculating the overall average and its trajectory over time.
Moving on, what do I hope to get done next year?
I want to wrap up WAKMD for good. That seems achievable fairly fast. Once that happens, I can get back to writing Hexagons.
I want to finish the Gamer Rewrite. That will be the bane of my existence. Another 80 chapters to go on that, which is about 20 days spend on it (I usually need a day to edit a batch of 5). Its getting generally faster to edit these as I progress, but its still a slog.
Once the Gamer Rewrite is done, I can get back to writing Welldark and Drip-Fed. Drip-Fed will be the first priority, but Welldark Volume 3 will definitely get put into the works. I just wouldn’t expect it before late 2024 at the earliest.
Beyond that, I’ll do as I usually do and publish my 5 Gamer chapters a week. No plans to shake that up this year. I might decrease it to 4 or 3 if I get closer to the end/one of my other stories gets unexpectedly very popular, but I don’t see that happening on that juncture.
On that note, if you could please take this survey to give me some intel about what y’all want to see, I’d be much obliged.
And now the shill links, just for good measure.
And with that, I consider this year reviewed. Really not my favourite one, but it could have been much worse. I have good-ish hopes for next year, since dumping the entire Gamer story on ScribbleHub is bound to get me some eyeballs.
Thanks for reading my rant,
Funatic.