January Highlights

Trying To Do More With Less

So the past few posts have ranged from existential mental health exercises to the usual Mad Cave stuff. Honestly, the past month has been a lot.

Reading through my shelves of books and stuff for an ad piece for Marvel Unlimited has really got me thinking about what I want in spending my time.

Pacing Is Everything To Me

I always seem to have a problem with anything feeling like it goes too slow. People always tell me to slow down but I can’t help that pacing is something I use to measure good time spent on. Especially when you’re a neurodivergent who applies himself to his passions.

It’s not just the stuff I read, sometimes it’s the things I watch. I had to drop Dragon Ball Daima on Netflix because despite good fight choreography and some decent animation gags, the pacing slows down too many times for me. Luckily Cobra Kai and Arcane make up for time lost.

Video games seem to make the process a little easier because I can engrain myself more easily in the pace. When it’s done right of course. Even when the point of something made boring on purpose and frustration can still be hard to deal with. The Nier games for example have great stories and the side quests leave you to apply yourself more into the gameplay. But the basic gameplay is so simple, it gets repetitively boring. Sometimes the auto battle features enhance that feeling.

Can You Connect People With Pace?

It’s so easy to engross yourself when you’ve got a pace down. But it’s a problem when you try to share it with others. I recently finished the first draft to The Wire Fence: Re-Opened. Just in time for me to get all of the rights to it back by buying everything in the CEX warehouses.

But before I send it to an editor somewhere, I am trying to fix pacing issues with the draft with a layman. Because while I ingratiate myself with the pace of what I write, I lose the connection to casual readers.

It’s always good to make the presentation digestible, I’m even doing some very simple roughs for how page layouts and character placements as well body language to emote expressions because some the descriptions I leave for artists might not be enough.

But my problem is talking this out with other people. Not because I think my work would be violated, but because social interactions are more like work for me. Especially since the layman I’m working with got into one very small aspect of this story even more than I did. Sometimes even regular conversations I have with friends tire me out.

It’s great that people are getting into this story. It makes the idea of being engaging very special. That’s part of what I’m trying to do with it; prove I can get an audience to follow along without alienating them. It’s just, am I gonna burn myself out because I move too fast or slow for people?

Needing Digital Strategies

As for posts, I’ve got so many ideas but I’m feeling a lot of performance anxiety the more I keep them like that. Like I lose the motivation and passion to put stuff down. I’ve read a few good comics, but nothing that encourages writing about them.

Even the post that got the most attention this month is something I took off Gutternaut because the SEO is terrible.

This and a post about Marvel novels adapting certain stories got more engagements than my usual stuff.

Meanwhile I got paid to write a Capital One ad post for Marvel Unlimited on Gutternaut. Yeah… funny how I got the gig by a third-party some time before that trojan horse news story.

Thing is, I never felt more motivated to put up a post like that before.

I’ve tried to get polls implemented to make motivation and discipline for post ideas. But no one seemed interested in participating. Either because of the paywalls, or because the ideas I put up just didn’t interest them. Almost as if the performance anxiety is contagious.

It’s just that I haven’t felt more motivation or discipline to do any posts than something that isn’t supposed to be the main brand.

This post’s PREVIEW got a like on Bluesky and that was it. Frankly it’s the same with everything involving links on Bluesky; more awareness, less engagement. Someone on here at least got the time to see that I’ve been trying to do things with the stuff I had.

I know that people here on Substack like my quick reviews for Mad Cave enough. They just want it all to be consistent. It just took me so many times to finally settle on publishing everything on Friday after all of the requests come in. Didn’t need to make so many updates that way. Maybe I should’ve announced that reviews were coming on different days, but… it feels like hype that would turn people away.

Like Walking On Your Eggshells

Not the best way to end 2025’s first 12th after a good start, but it is what it is. Performance anxiety to get in the rhythm of what I have. Problem is, I need to plan ahead in the real world and it’s a lot of work that tires me out.

Maybe I should consider February the time I spend on that guidebook about comics around the world. Or maybe putting more effort into that interactive story I’m working on in Gutternaut. As for posts, I’ll do what I want.

I’m gonna leave a poll if anyone will be interested.