#oneaday Day 997: Reducing the pressure

Been soul-searching a bit recently because I don't feel like I've found quite the right balance between my personal projects and my day job stuff. Obviously I'm super proud of my personal projects and what I've built with them — but it's the day job stuff that pays, and I'm proud of what I'm doing there too. So, rationally speaking, the day job stuff has to take priority somewhat.

With that in mind, I think I need to give permission to myself to be more "irregular" with at least some of my personal projects. The videos are not usually a problem, since there's something new to cover every week there — but the writing side of things for the Atelier MegaFeature is causing me a bit of trouble at the moment.

To be clear, it's not that I don't want to write about it — I remain absolutely committed to seeing this massive feature through to its conclusion — but rather I don't want to appear like I'm spinning my wheels in terms of what I'm writing about just for the sake of having something new each week.

Due to juggling it with day job commitments, Atelier Firis has been taking me quite a while to get through, and I'm conscious of the fact that I've already spent quite a few individual articles exploring it; there's plenty more I could write about, I'm sure, but I don't want to do that just for the sake of it.

So with that in mind, I'm going to take a new approach with stuff on MoeGamer. It appears that the only one who is really making me beholden to a "schedule" of sorts is myself, since none of you have complained if I've had to take a week away for whatever reason. And as such, I'm going to tackle things with a much more flexible approach. I still intend to cover things in as much detail as I have been, but I'm going to take an "it's done when it's done" approach rather than making a rigid commitment to getting something out every weekend.

What this means in the immediate term is that there probably won't be an Atelier MegaFeature piece this weekend, and I don't intend to write another one until I've actually beaten Atelier Firis and am in a position to write about the narrative in its entirety. From thereon, I will continue to spend several articles writing about the remaining games, but they won't necessarily be on a weekly basis — they'll be done when they're done, depending on my own progress and how comfortable I feel talking about the various aspects of the games in question.

There'll still be some updates on MoeGamer — I need to catch up on video posts from last week — but for now, that's the situation. Giving myself "permission" to do this is something I think is important — and having you all witness me giving myself "permission" to take a bit of the pressure off myself is equally important, because you can hold me to it!

Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today. I hope you continue to enjoy what I do — and if you're not already checking out my day job stuff at Rice Digital and Retrounite, I encourage you to do so. It's covering all the same sort of stuff I do on MoeGamer and YouTube, I just get paid for it! Everyone wins.

Oh, and if you're on the socials, a share or two of the stuff I do wouldn't go amiss. Twitter's cursed "algorithm" is being a right shit to anyone posting off-site links at the moment, so I feel like a lot of the stuff I post isn't getting seen. Anything you can do to help with "organic reach" would be enormously helpful and much appreciated. Thank you!

Anyway. Weekend now. Sleep. Good night!