Alora Fane

I spent this week trying to tackle some things I'd been avoiding, including posting my music on YouTube, which I've finally started doing after talking about that for years!! I also spent a lot of time both on and waiting for phone calls.

First, I saw ∞ this delightful post on Reddit ∞ earlier in the week, in which an indie dev looked into others who'd originally posted about quitting their (often well-paid) jobs to work on indie games full time (I've seen a few posts like that myself; they seem to come up every so often). His findings were... not promising!

(Basically, the majority quit along the way or earned peanuts or literally nothing after years of effort. Only one could be called a success, and even that earned less than an average wage.)

Clearly the life path I'm on isn't a wise on sane one, plus due to other factors it's not exactly working out as it is, and some changes are in order. I still definitely want and intend to finish Atonal Dreams, but I've also been thinking a whole lot about what else I could do to earn a living and maintain my sanity (which I notice is degrading with prolonged isolation).

My first step towards that will be going out to see a mental health person who might help me... as I wrote about, what, three weeks ago? Which is when I was told after reaching out to my GP that I'd get a call that Thursday or Friday.

I still haven't got that call, and the thought that I might get a call any minute has been hanging over me for the past three weeks and causing me a lot of stress. Ugh.

I asked the doctor again on Monday about it and was told the person I'd be talking with 'was in on Thursday', and that's it (this was via text enquiry, which they marked as resolved immediately after so I couldn't ask any followup questions). Still no call, though.

I'm assuming this is an anxiety-disorder-related thing, but if there's some specific event or appointment I'm anticipating, I can't focus on much else until it's out of the way. It's not even that I'm anxious about the thing itself, exactly, more something like missing it? Not being ready? Especially for something like a phone call, which you have mere seconds to respond to or else you miss it and have to start some new process liking calling back which I find even more anxiety-inducing and would prefer to avoid. So there's a feeling of having to be constantly alert until it's over, which gets draining. And it's much worse when the time of the thing I'm waiting for is so undefined or it's postponed!

Because I've been struggling to do anything on Atonal Dreams for months anyway and I had that preventing me from properly focusing, I decided instead to use this week to try to tackle some of the mental barriers that are holding me back. Whether I stick with games dev or try something else, I'll still need to overcome these issues regardless.

I tried to do at least one 'major thing' each day:

On Monday, I... apparently wrote out something I'd post on Reddit about being the dev of MARDEK who's struggling to get around to promoting my new game due to trauma from a toxic community that developed around my games in the past. I thought it could be more interesting and worthy of discussion than just purely showing off my work, and it's the sort of thing I like to write and read about...

...but I got cold feet because I imagined hostility or mockery for being too much of a sissy weakling and not just 'growing a pair' or whatever, which is itself a symptom of that trauma, and didn't end up posting it. So that was a bit of a failure.

On Tuesday, I wrote a post on ∞ my Patreon ∞ which was a follow-up to some previous posts.

I wrote the other posts as I worked through some planning for Atonal Dreams back in December, but due to my poor mental state at the time I reacted badly to critical comments and had been avoiding reading others there since then.

Just psychologically pushing through the protective barriers my mind had put up was by far the hardest part, and I had to make use of several psychological techniques I've learned over the years to do it... only to be completely underwhelmed (or I suppose relieved) by how what I'd been avoiding out of fear wasn't even remotely bad anyway.

I haven't checked the comments (if any) on the new post since then, not due to the same kind of avoidance but just because I've been struggling to focus so I thought I'd save it until the start of the next work week (Monday).

On Wednesday, I FINALLY got around to something I've been flaccidly considering for forever now, which is putting my compositions on YouTube.

Here's the first one I uploaded:

The second:

And the third, which I literally just made public as I posted this:

So that's... something! They only have a fairly pathetically small number of views currently (the first has the most at 109 views), but not as few as I was expecting, and - from a tiny bit of googling plus experience seeing small channels - not less than the norm for a new, niche channel.

I have mixed feelings about it though. I never looked at views and rarely checked comments on my old account, as I saw it as more of a file sharing dumping ground than a curated, focused channel, but I intend to try to run this new one at least somewhat like how a small channel 'should' be run. This means I care more about those views and comments, and since I'm used to following creators who get tens of thousands or millions of each, comparisons seep in even though it's absurdly unrealisitc that a brand new channel focused on something so specific would come close.

Nor would I even want it to! I suppose my ideal target in terms of attention is maybe getting a small 4-figure number per video; anything more than that would be more frightening than anything. Still a long way off, though, if purely original content (as opposed to videos about or featuring familiar work created by others, eg games, films) even can rise above the bottom.

The second video has significantly fewer views than the first, so I'm curious to see if that's the beginning of a pattern.

I saw some statistic the other day about how 80 years worth of videos were uploaded to YouTube every minute, or some absurd numbers like that. When I just tried googling that, I got all kinds of conflicting numbers, none of which I imagine are all that accurate, but the point is that YouTube is huuuuge, so getting noticed is... well, probably less likely than becoming a wealthy indie games dev.

Something I was surprised by though is that I got any comments at all, and that at least a couple were positive and encouraging. So that motivates me to keep this up.

I intended to upload one a day, but checked to see what times were best to post... then forgot to actually do so when that time came, whoops. I suppose a reliable posting schedule is something that'll emerge the more I get used to it.

I'll be uploading stuff I've previously never shared alongside game soundtrack pieces, with a focus on stuff I composed over the last three or four years. I've got enough of these pieces that I could keep up daily posting for a long time, though I'm hoping it'll motivate me to compose new stuff more often too.

On Thursday and Friday, I... apparently struggled to do much of anything beacuse the thought of the call was hanging over me...?

Oh, wait, right, I also talked to two of my friends a whopping total of THREE WHOLE TIMES this week. Wow! Can you believe such a gregarious life is even possible??

It's remarkable for me just because I go days or weeks without talking with anyone, and these were hours-long phone calls. And these days it's usually weeks or months between calls with either of these friends, so a video call plus two phone calls in a week means this week's the most social I've had to be in ages.

Which was mixed. After one call my social anxiety flared up and I was consumed by worries for days about abandonment or having messed up or being pathetic, and another was mostly my friend ranting about her relationship issues that I couldn't exactly relate to but wanted to lend a friendly ear to anyway, so that was taxing in itself, as were the thoughts afterwards about being the sort of guy girls come to vent to but wouldn't want to be in a sexual relationship with, which meant at least a bit of wandering around in the entire related mental dungeon I've built around that... Bleh.

(Though I'm genuinely not interested in either of these friends as potential partners, so it was more of a general thought than like "but why won't she go out with MEEE??")

Distracting, anyway.

I wanted to do some work on a side project I've mentioned a few times recently, or to at least write a Patreon post about it so then I could gauge whether to do anything with it, or which direction to take... but I put that off because of the combination of poor focus and I think a lack of replies on the previous post (from Tuesday) which I didn't want to push aside and leave forgotten, since it's more important to get feedback about it than it is for the side project.

Sooo... pfff. Mixed week, overall. Not exactly as purely pleasing as past weeks where I'd been able to just focus for hours a day on making actual progress on dev work, but perhaps better in the grander scheme of things because I was able to tackle at least a couple of things I'd been avoiding for a long time.

I want to spend next week working on that side project, as it's something I feel I could finish off fairly soon and... well, I'll probably write a Patreon post about what it even is in a day or two.

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