TL;DR: I want to finish my Homestuck blog post series before I lose interest in this personal project, but this may not work if I keep following through with my current posting schedule. I will see if I’m able to make a post every five days rather than every week or speed up progress even further than that, especially during school breaks.
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve slowed down progress on my Homestuck blog post series quite a bit, and I wanted to make a blog post talking about that.
For the first three months of this blog post series, I made a post covering about 100 pages every 3.5 days. If Homestuck ends at page 10,000 of MSPA—which is a likely estimate given what Hussie has said in his news posts—and if I were to have followed through with my original schedule through this whole post series—then this blog series would have taken a total of nine months. But my recent trends following my grand change of plans would make this take much longer. My first post following this change was released on a Sunday, next one a week after that, next one a week and two days after that. If I were to continue my general pattern of 50 pages a week with all of the remaining pages—and that’s still assuming Homestuck ends at page 10,000—then I would have two years of posts to go. I’m not even sure if I could keep a project going for that long, and my end goal is to finish my blog post series. This presents a problem for my ending goal.
Ever since I was little, I’ve had a history of starting these big projects, and almost always abandoning them at some point. And like I said in my hiatus post, I’ve realized that I’ve gotten better at following through projects, and I said that it would be a shame for me to abandon this post series. But if I want to keep going at this project I would still need to be into Homestuck, and I’m not sure if I can be into something for that long of a time. Typically I have various interest phases last for a year or two and most often end with lingering with less strength. This will no doubt happen to my current interest in Homestuck. So if I want to finish this post series and not abandon it out of disinterest, I’ll need to speed this up somewhat.
Now I totally could make posts at a faster rate than what I’m doing. Why am I not doing that? When I realized stuff about how this post series took up too much of my time, I decided to push it way to the bottom of my priorities, below even my other projects. But I’m still not sure if I could go just as well putting this project higher in my priorities—after all, my other projects are also pretty easy distractions. If I made a post covering 50 pages twice a week instead of once a week, I would have a year of posts to go. That’s a good bit more feasible than staying into Homestuck for another two years. After all, the comic will almost certainly end within this year, and after that, its popularity will definitely decrease but stay substantial because of its sister project, the upcoming Homestuck-based video game Hiveswap.
Remember how I put a hiatus on this blog post series to focus on school work? Well, that clearly didn’t go as far as I thought it would. I constantly hear of people never having free time because of school stuff, so I’m inclined to think the same will generally happen to me during spells of homework loads. But I can never quite overcome the urge to slack off (though I have gotten somewhat better), which may be part of why in the finals weeks, I still made two posts a week; the other reason might just be because honestly, I didn’t have that much studying to do during that time.
When writing this post, a thought ran through my head that when I feel ready to, I could go back to making posts twice a week. But that would be kind of like going back to square one, because I started this post series by making posts twice a week. OK, that technically isn’t true; I originally wanted to make this post series weekly, but I quickly changed it to twice-weekly. But the point still stands. It may, and I repeat may, be feasible to do posts as I currently do them but twice a week. But I would need to speed things up somewhat to do that. Originally, it would go like this: publish a post, write up my next post the same day, spend the next few days revising it. But as time passed, I would sometimes spend a day without working on my post series, or write posts over multiple days rather than one day, slowing progress, not to mention that my posts have gotten way longer as they progressed. I could just publish a post as soon as I’m done, but I like having revising time because I always think of quite a bit of stuff to add to my commentary that I didn’t have when first writing up my post; I even sometimes add commentary to a post after publishing it.
But not all is lost. During breaks from school, I could probably speed up production from what I currently do. Maybe during regular school weeks I could publish a post about every five days, and during breaks I could do faster than that, like every three days. That might actually work pretty well. The weird thing about this big plan is, this isn’t something important to my real life, rather a fun personal project, which makes me wonder why I should care this much, and made me question this post series in the first place. But the bottom line is, I want to finish this project before I lose interest, and I’m not totally sure how to make that goal attainable.
Next post will be Sunday, then I’ll try doing a post every five days and see how that works.