I’m continuing to build a small internet presence. Nothing notable to most, but enough for me to get a bit of feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
And this feedback is huge for me and my sanity. I want (see: “need”) to make this a career, so understanding what works for an audience is important. Yes, sticking to truth in what I believe to be “good” is important, and I’m not leaving said area, but it is an area that covers a lot of space. Therefore, I think it best to pick somewhere within this “good” area people respond to, and then perhaps, later on, once I have a following that trusts me, lead them on over into more unexplored places within the “good” area.
That’s my current philosophy on how to make art and a business at the same time. The problem may directly be posed: I don’t know where in this “good” area that people will respond, and the only way to figure this out is to release things. I’ve been doing this already with my philosophy through these blog posts and YouTube videos.¹
Now, I’m doing this with my art and philosophy, but those are only small elements of the primary products I wish to disperse into the world. That is to say, I’m not receiving a fast enough feedback loop on my modern visual novels!
With this in mind, I intend to cancel the project — the one about the Korean café that I mentioned in a previous blog — and instead work on projects that I can finish in an iteration cycle of roughly three months. It is a bit sad for me to do this, as my favorite format is a scope at which would take about a year to complete, so this is cutting things down to a quarter of that! Obviously, this limits the types of stories I can tell right now, and I believe the structural gold of what modern visual novels can be will be found later, but I also believe this is necessary preparation for both my career and the medium. What I am creating will be the “short story” to the “novel” of modern visual novels. I do not typically, except on rare occasions, love short stories like I do novels, but I will say I’ve found more and more examples of short stories that I actually do enjoy.
For instance, I prefer Fujimoto’s short story anime collection over the “Chainsaw Man” one. I also quite love the short story of Gogol’s “The Nose”. While I don’t love the experience of reading it, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in The World” is a short story the metaphor of which has been generally useful in my mental web.²
So why do I like these stories so much, while I haven’t enjoyed shorts in the past? One is my more recent distaste for immersion, which more often requires living with something for a while, but let’s ignore this. What I think each of these stories does an excellent job of two things:
- They are character first rather than lore or grand-scale plotting, which is the focus of many of the sci-fi or horror short stories I’ve tried to read. To be fair, my preference in every story is that of character-focused.
- They choose an idea that is “new” and worth exploring, but is small enough that it can be comprehensively explored by the end of the story. If a short story chooses a concept that is too grand, we never actually have time to get to the extent of the conceptual boundary. The extents, I believe, are where we find the most interesting ideas.
So here’s where I wish to pivot my career.
For the next while, or, until I build up savings enough to justify a grander tale, I would like to focus on smaller productions. Productions that take, at max, 3 months to complete in full. This would have been unreasonable had I not completed Everything I Know, and Everything I’m Ever Gonna Know, but since the project’s completion I’ve developed processes in which will allow me to turn around productions more quickly. So much time spent on this previous project was simply discovering how to competently create a project without the use of an engine, as well as porting and publishing. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been streamlining the methods by which I do these things, and hopefully I am getting close to turning them into non-factors (or at least as minimal of factors as possible). Yes, I also suspect that the projects themselves will be smaller in development scope, but I do suspect some of this will not be noticed as I have a better understanding of how to get a better “bang for my buck” in development choices.
¹I am, by the by, very uneasy about doing the YouTube video element of this. I wish I could just leave all this to blog posts, but, given what will be seen in the rest of this article, the content has to actually be seen, and this just won’t happen if I simply post on my personal website. I’ve tried other text-based blogging sites such as Medium, but there was seemingly no organic traction via its algorithm. If anyone knows how to gain traction, reach out please. For now, it seems my only choice is to read these text-based articles on YouTube to gain response.
²"Mental web", I’m sure, is interpretable by the reader, but by all means, I’m just talking about the interconnected ideas that make up my philosophy.