Originally Posted: October 27, 2017
Into the grave! Insert creepy Halloween laugh here
It's slowly sunk in over the last few days that I'm heading towards a burnout. The problem with burnouts is that they're often a lot of fun until they suddenly aren't. I've been having fun working on Accidental Woman; passion and the community have been driving me forward. It's too easy to get sucked into something you're passionate about though, and that's a particular weakness of mine.
To be clear upfront: I'm not stopping work or doing anything drastic.
To be perfectly honest, I expected that I would start approaching burnout, and that I would have to take steps to prevent what would otherwise be inevitable. What I didn't expect is that it would happen quite this soon. Maybe it's all the crazy extra things that've happened the last couple months, or maybe the rapid increase in support made me push harder than I expected. Whatever the case, I thought I'd make it to the end of stage 1 before I had to start forcing a work schedule on myself.
I've also come to realize that the people who support me and follow the work I do know how much effort I'm putting in. And the people who don't will continue to make comments on various websites about me not putting in enough effort. I'll probably continue to get occasional Patreon exit surveys with "creator doesn't deliver as promised" no matter what I do. (I recently got one where the person took the time to write about 100 words of comments stating essentially the same thing.)
Results from a chronic stress/burnout test:
Let me take you through the last couple days. Wednesday morning I woke up at 9am, and worked on AW until 2pm. I spent about 30 minutes of that time with my son. At 2, I got ready for work and went in. While at work, I spent about 6 hours working on AW. I got home at about 12:15, and after a shower and getting ready for bed, spent until 1:30am on AW. Spent an hour winding down (fapping), and went to sleep. Today, I woke up at 8am, started working on AW at 8:30, and repeated the process until 2pm, then went into work and spent another 6 hours on it. Right now I'm at home, and it's 1:15am as I type this.
This has been pretty regular for me. I carve some time out on my days off from work, but I usually work between 8 and 12 hours a day on AW, often closer to 12 than 8. I'm not complaining, because it's something I want to do. But I also realize that if I keep it up, I won't want to do it anymore. This post is basically about taking the steps to make sure AW succeeds.
There have been a few clues, and some helpful warnings about burnout from supporters. Probably the biggest I've noticed is that while the amount of time I spend working hasn't changed (it's actually slowly increased), my productivity has fallen markedly. If I work 12 hours but only get 8 hours of work done, I might as well be working 8 but doing it in a healthier way. There have been some other signs, declining health and plenty of new grey hair. (That I'm too young for, damnit!) I think the biggest factor recently was that I was trying to write dialog with Lily, and I just couldn't "connect" with the characters to write it.
So, I need to fix this, because AW is too important to me to not fix the problem. It's also just not worth it to lose sight of living life, which I haven't been doing much of for quite a while now.
Plan: I'm going to force myself to scale back to 4 hours for the next two days to recover a little, and then try to set up a schedule with no more than 56-60 hours per week.
Effect: Hopefully minimal. I'm still ahead based on my development schedule, and increased productivity will hopefully make up for the lost time (That doesn't seem to be doing much good right now anyway.) We'll have to see how it balances out exactly.
Progress Thus Far:
So I thought it'd be fun to see how much work I've done on AW so far, so I used the strictest word count method I could to count the words file-by-file of all my code and writing in the game.
188,974 words.
By this counting method, this counts as 3 words:
<<set $status.addictMax = Math.max($status.addictSex,$status.addictAlc,$status.addictHeat,$status.addictSatyr,$status.addictFocus,$status.addictCum,$status.addictZone,$status.addictCream)>>
The standard counting method puts me at 239,895.
And that doesn't really factor in revisions and improvements. I have to say, I'm kind of impressed with myself. The average words-per-week of successful authors is between 5,000-7,500 per week when they're writing. Very prolific pulp writers might write 15,000.
Based on these numbers, I've written 11,116 to 14,111 words per week, and also did regular posts, answered questions, made some art, and plenty of other side tasks. Not bad for someone that already has a job and everything else going on!
And with that, I'm going to try and get some sleep. I'll see you on the flip-side.
