(For the vital info, skip to the TL;DR section)
As you may have noticed, if you keep up with the comic regularly, UTC is slipping behind its Friday schedule more often, by half a day or more.
The “vacation” schedule I’ve been trying out during production on Chapters 14 and 15 — where I take one week off roughly every 3 months — clearly isn’t sustainable. There hasn’t been a single case in the past year where I was able to stick to the designated week off. Something always comes up to throw me off-whack, whether it’s problems at my regular job, personal obligations and activities, or plain old burnout.
The conclusion I’ve drawn from this is that I need to give myself more breaks. I work a full-time job, am trying to maintain a healthy social life, good sleeping and eating habits, and find time to relax and consume content rather than produce it. One UTC page takes on average 8 hours to make. That’s effectively a whole extra day of work per week.
Many of you are probably thinking that I don’t need to justify myself for being a human with regular wants and needs, but it does have to be called out for those who may not know that UTC, and art in general, is a side gig for me, not a career.
Now, here’s the rub: I have 3 long vacations scheduled for the last 4 months of this year. I’ve been planning these for many months now, and have known that I needed to get UTC a few weeks ahead of schedule in order for the comic to update steadily while I’m gone.
Unfortunately, every time I got ahead of schedule, it was undone soon after. When I put extra work into the comic one week, I didn’t have enough energy left to work on it 8 whole hours the week after that, or something else came up that took away time.
I simply can’t get the comic ahead of schedule with the current pace of updates. No matter what, there will be disruptions to the comic’s release from now until the end of the year. So, to minimize the impact on you, the reader, I’m going to work those “weeks off” into the release calendar in as organized a fashion as I can.
TL;DR
Starting in September and until further notice, UTC will update twice a month on every 1st and 3rd Monday. Patreon bonus content will release on the Mondays in between.
The new schedule is organized here.
That means for the rest of 2022, there will only be 9 more pages (well, 8 pages and the Chapter 16 cover).
Feel free to give feedback about this new schedule.
Thank you for continuing to enjoy and support UTC! We’re getting there.
Jim
