Hiatus Announcement

Transcript by Raina Harper

Kyle

Hey everyone. I wanted to quickly give you an update about the status of Quest Friends episodes for the next couple of months.

If you’ve checked our social media or listened to the announcement break for last episode, you’ve probably already heard this, but for the next probably six months or so Quest Friends is going to go on an episode release hiatus. I’m going to first explain what exactly that means, and then after that, for anyone interested, I might delve more into thoughts about how this came about and the nature of self-employed work.

So, what’s gonna happen is, as I said, for the next about six months or so – it could be less, it could be three, it could be a little bit longer – we will not be releasing main episodes of Quest Friends! Hereafter. Instead, what I’m going to do is, on the first Monday of each month, I’m going to be releasing a crossover episode that I did on another show sometime probably over the last year.

A lot of them actually explore the world of Hereafter in really fun ways. There’s one where we go to Tsarvia that I want to do. There’s one where we explored vampires, the lore of vampires. So, every Monday—Not every Monday. The first Monday of each month, I will be releasing one of those.

Behind the scenes, we’re still gonna be recording episodes. I’m not gonna disappear entirely. If you ask questions on Tumblr, we will answer them. I still want to do the Season 1 listen-along streams where I work on the wiki. We’re essentially just limiting the actual release of episodes because I’ve been falling behind on them and because editing is by far the greatest amount of time I put into this. As I search for a full-time job and get situated with it, I want to be able to focus all of my energy on, you know, the job hunting.

If you back us on Patreon, I will be halting monthly payments starting on Sunday, April 30, so for a lot of people listening I’ve already halted those payments. I will still be releasing some content in May because I fell behind in April, so I need to get the April short story and the video outtakes for Cryptid Cryptids and all of that sort of stuff. I’m gonna be releasing that in May. But, similar to episodes, I’m gonna be doing a freeze on Patreon stuff.

If you back us on Patreon, you don’t need to change anything, you’re just gonna be getting a little bit extra money back each month. BY that I mean you won’t be getting extra money, you just won’t be spending money that you normally would be spending.

So, that is the short version. We’re still gonna be working on stuff behind the scenes. It is very important to me that we have a commitment to continue the show. This isn’t gonna be one of those “the show announces a hiatus and then just never comes back after three years.” No, we have about three more arcs of Hereafter that we want to tell, and barring some catastrophe or some much more radical change in my life, we will be doing that.

We’re still gonna be working on the show behind the scenes, it’s just you’re gonna be getting once-a-month crossover bonus episodes and then in about six months or so the Patreon content will start resuming, you will get the recap episode to remind you of everything that’s happened in Hereafter so far, and then we will be onto Arc 2.

Alright. If you were just here for the low-down on what’s going on, that’s it. You can head out. If you’re more curious about what and why and how and just what’s going on… feel free to listen. I’m just gonna kind of ramble for a bit until such point that I feel like I have started repeating myself, which is probably gonna be relatively quickly.

You don’t know this because you don’t edit the show, but I repeat myself a lot and I edit that out a lot, but I’m not doing it here. Just kidding, I actually have already edited myself out a couple of times. Anyways!

So, I want to preface what I’m about to say with that this is really meant to be just an interesting case study into my experience running Quest Friends full-time. It’s definitely not something that I’m garnering for sympathy or anything like that. I recognize that being able to do what I’ve done in the first place has been an incredible privilege. Even if it didn’t end the way I thought it would, I still think it’s helpful and useful for me to know, which is why I’m sharing it.

[00:05:00]

So, at the end of Season 1: Flashback Future, actually right before the final episodes came out, Emily and I moved closer to their family in Arizona. On their property there was a building that we were able to stay at rent-free, so I took the savings I made with my previous job and moved down here, and I was like “I’m gonna do Quest Friends full-time.”

The idea was that, you know, I had already been producing a show full-time. Well, not full-time, but I had been producing a full show, so if I moved down here I would be able to start doing all of the other stuff like marketing and maybe working on another show or a supplemental thing. I really wanted to do a visual novel and I still want to make a visual novel one day. You know, stuff like that.

So, we moved down here. I’m not gonna go over what happened play-by-play on those months, because honestly it was pretty much the same from the start, which was me saying “I will do this other thing when I have time.”

There are two metaphors I think are useful for explaining my experience with full-time work. The first one is water. Water, or cats if you want to think of it that way, will change to fit the shape of whatever it’s put into. If you put it into a circle, it will take the shape of a circle. If you put it in a cube, it will take the shape of a cube. That is what I am like with time. If you give me a couple of days to get stuff done, I will get it done in a couple of days. If you give me a month, I will get it done within a month.

Sometimes I’ll be a little late, but for the most part I really, really often can lose the forest for the threes, and that is something that will happen if I’m allowed to.

What this means is that, if I’m working a full-time job and I can only edit on the weekends, I’ll get an episode done over the weekends. But, if I have given myself a full two weeks and I don’t have to go home at 5 because my full-time job is at home, I will take two weeks to get an episode done. Or you know, all the supplementary stuff, like… well, not social media posts, I’ve always been bad at that. Like session prep. Session prep has gotten so much longer since the beginning.

So, that was issue number one. Issue number two, or metaphor number two, is a lot like GMing.

It is my philosophy of GMing, of game-mastering, that a great game master is a contextualizer. You might come in with a relative story or narrative structure. I as a writer always have a vague idea of where the overarching plot is going to end. But, especially when I do more casual home games, I’ll have some characters, maybe a setting, maybe a twist, but for the most part what will happen is I’ll wait for the characters that my players bring or some of the jokes that they make and I will take those and I will contextualize them.

“Oh, you joked that your toothbrush fell in the toilet. That is the premise now. As it fell, you saw a terrifying hand reach up and grab it, or grab you, and pull you in. Now you’ll have this toilet monster adventure.” That’s what I like to think of as a great game master.

I also think that’s what a great showrunner often does as well. It’s a lot like carpentry. When you’re a great GM… and again, when I say great GM I mean the way I like to do it, it’s like your players have given you a bunch of wood. They found a bunch of planks of wood and some nails and some glue. They bring it to you and you look at it and you say, “you know, looking at all this wood, I think this would make a great table.”

What a lot of people think they HAVE to do when they get very stressed about making sure everything is right and perfect in place as game master is basically you’re telling your own narrative to the players who are just kind of shuffled along with it. That is a lot of hard work that is unnecessary.

In that example, instead of taking all of the supplies your players are freely giving you, you are going to the woods, you’re grabbing a hatchet, you’re chopping down the tree, you’re bringing the tree home, you’re cutting the tree into logs, you’re sanding the logs down, all in structure of what you have decided is going to be a chair, and only after the fact do you realize, you know, that actually works better as a table. I don't know if that metaphor works at all for you, but I like it for me so I’m sharing it.

[00:10:00]

Essentially, it’s the same idea in how I ran the project. We  had shared a lot of things beforehand. I still took on a lot of the work, but we shared social media and we shared short story privileges. Privileges? Short story responsibilities. There’s the term.

Afterwards, since the Patreon money was going towards me and I had the time to work on all of that, everything fell into my camp. I had gone from a relationship where I was fully utilizing the resources of everyone else to basically doing everything on my own with the exception of the quarterly Patreon prints that Emily did and then the transcripts which our transcriber Raina has still done a phenomenal job with.

This proved to be challenging because, where I came into this thinking I’m gonna have all this extra time, suddenly doing the things I had already done required a lot more work and I was predisposed to taking a longer time being perfectionist with them because… I could be. So, I was pretty much churning out things at the rate that I had been doing previously. I had been more consistent with releases, but I would be more perfectionist with the things I already had even when I found time-saving tools like an auto silence delete or a program that would… a levelator, it just levels your audio.

I still somehow found a way to make episodes take just as long. I also was unfairly comparing myself to a 9 to 5 workday. I was like, well, if most people can do that much work, then I should be able to do eight hours of consistent work. But that’s not how it goes!

If you really have to work that time, you will work the full eight hours, but more often than not… I forget what the story said, but it’s like three to four hours, six tops, especially in a thought-heavy field. All fields require a lot of thought, but I mean something that requires a lot of mental energy. You’re not gonna be working a full eight hours. But, I thought I had to, so I would be working full days until a day where I just suddenly crashed.

So, I was working more to get things done that were probably a little better, but to be honest, not noticeable to anyone but me, and it just wasn’t fun. Work doesn’t have to be fun, but I don't think I was enjoying the process more, and notably, because I didn’t really have a whole lot of extra time, I wasn’t actually spending a lot of time on things like marketing which they recommend. “They,” in a vague sense. Articles you read recommend that you spend I think it’s as much time marketing as you do working on a show.

The thing is, I’ve always said I’m bad at marketing… I don’t fully believe that. I just think I don’t like it. I just think I don’t like doing it, and because of that I wouldn’t. It would get to the lowest part of my priority queue. But, then the savings started to deplete, because while we do have phenomenal support from our patrons, I wasn’t doing a whole lot for marketing pushes.

Some of you listening have come from promo push efforts that I have done, like the crossovers, but those are so insignificant compared to what I need to be doing. You know, the age-old philosophy, “if you build it, they will come.” Well, they’re not gonna come if they don’t know about it. You need to market the thing that you’re working on! And I wouldn’t do it. So, it was challenging.

I’m also just a person that, you know, I… if you had to decide, I am a shy person but I am an extraverted person. I like interacting with others. I like talking with other people. It’s one of the reasons I love doing those crossover episodes.

But, I was working fully alone. I’d work with Raina on transcripts, I’d work with Emily on prints, I would talk with players about the sessions and just talk in general because we’re super-close friends, but besides that the work was me. I was doing the work alone, and I had created a situation where most of the work fell just on me. But that’s not sustainable.

It’s just not sustainable to be editing episodes where you’re putting a lot of effort into cutting out a lot of things, you’re adding a bunch of music even though it’s royalty-free, and you’re just doing that biweekly. It’s not sustainable. It was a lot of pressure, and a lot of fun was out of that.

[00:15:00]

Another reason that I felt like I had lost some of the fun, too, was there was additional pressure with Hereafter. Now, if you feel like you’ve succeeded at something, which I felt like we did with Flashback Future, there is going to be pressure when you move to another project.

That only gets worse when this new project is basically… it’s your way of proving, or not necessarily proving, but your new project is the thing that is going to hopefully give you money, and a job. If not a career, at least just money so that you’re not burning a hole in your savings. So, I felt a lot of pressure with Hereafter.

That just meant that I spent more work working on things than I needed to, and it was just… it was less fun than it could have been otherwise. It was still fun, and I’m really happy with the episodes we released so far, but there was a lot of pressure there. As someone with not great anxiety… I don’t want to rate it, but it’s bad, it’s pretty bad anxiety… pressure did not help.

So, that was a lot of rambling, a lot of talking about stuff, but essentially the short version… If you want to use this as a case study to figure out what kind of things do you need to keep in mind when you’re gonna do self-employed work, a couple of things are, one, you want to make sure that the free schedule works for you. It just doesn’t work for me. I adjust to fit whatever time I’m given even if it’s all of the time.

Two, you gotta remember that the amount that we’re expected to work in workplaces is already too much. Forty hours a work week is unnecessarily long, and you gotta remember that we’re only working like half of it. A lot of us are, not everyone of course, but a lot of people are only working about half of that.

It’s so, so easy to look at those things, to look at those statistics of “people only work three to four hours a day,” or, uh… I’m trying to think of some other ones, like “we should do a three-day weekend,” and think ha-ha, yes, for you, but not for me, because I need to work that extra time and I don’t care if studies say that working longer than 30 or 40 hours a week actually is less productive than taking the breaks, because for me it isn’t.

No, it is true for you. You are not some special unique exception to the equation. Obviously there are differences amongst people and situations, but it’s only gonna hurt you.

Three, if you possibly can, don’t do it alone. I know the structure of the podcast and the way I produce it is going to be different when we get back because, simply put, doing it all by myself, or at least doing so much of it by myself, is not sustainable. I struggle to do it full-time; it’s gonna be very hard to go back when I have a different job on top of it.

Fourth… I keep saying these numbers and then forgetting what my next point is. Oh right. Fourth, think about all the extra stuff you gotta do. You gotta think about all the extra stuff you gotta do. Not only the new stuff you gotta do like marketing, but also all the old stuff that you might be bringing onto yourself if you didn’t listen to Point 3 and start putting more work on yourself, because that’s gonna make a difference.

And then five is a choose your own option, because there’s probably more takeaways from this, but pre-editing I have been going for like 21 minutes, so I think I have put enough insights in for right now.

Anyways, yeah. Thank you for listening to my rambling. I hope this was useful in some way. If any of you work in arts or entertainment fields and know anyone who needs a project manager, you can send an email to QuestFriendsCast@gmail.com or go to our contact page. That’s what I’m doing for grad school right now. I talked to friends and we realized that seemed to be the thing that worked best for me.

Another important sign, because leading a project team and managing all of that versus doing all of the direct work yourself… there’s crossovers, and I’m putting those crossovers in my resume, but they are radically different experiences. So, I think where I’m going now versus where I’ve been is very telling about why this whole experience didn’t…

[00:20:00]

I don’t want to say it didn’t work out, because again, I got valuable insight. We did the mid-season which I loved. We did the first arc of Hereafter, which I loved. We made really good stuff, but it was made in such a way that needs to be changed.

Oh right, there we go! Point number five! Point number six is choose your own. Point number five is you really gotta think about if you’re doing this for the art or for the money. I would talk to Emily’s dad who is very successful in events and different kinds of entertainment. He would provide all sorts of very interesting feedback. “What if you tried this? What if you tried this? Here are ideas that could make the show more profitable.” 

When you’re trying to make things work, you gotta be willing to explore, and every time I said “no, I want to make the show as it is,” which is fine, it’s admirable, it’s what I’m doing… but if you’re trying to make something your job, money doesn’t have to be the only thing, but unfortunately it does have to be the main thing, or at least it has to be a constant thing that is kept in mind and respected. You need to be willing to make changes for that.

Again, if your main goal is really to make a sizable amount of money, that’s just what you gotta think about. Were I starting a new project new… I said “new” twice… but if I were starting a new project, that is something that maybe I would be more willing to think about, but with Quest Friends I just want to make it the way it is, and because of that it’s not gonna be the money-maker.

It could be. Someday it could make cash, but I can’t assume it is going to. It is the story I want to tell first, and money a distant second. The two aren’t incompatible by any means, but I knew what my priority was, and because of that I gotta find a different way to make money. Savings are not infinite. I’m already pulling from Emily’s and I feel terrible, so… I mean, we’re married, it’s both o four savings, but yeah.

Okay! Well, that was a nice conclusion truncated by me remembering something last minute, so I will just quickly end this by saying thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the show. If you hang out on our social media accounts or follow us on Twitch or hang out on our Discord, I’ll be seeing you whenever. Who knows when I’ll be posting stuff there. But, if you just listen to episodes, I will see you… well, previous me will see you every Monday, every first Monday, not every Monday. Previous me will see you every first Monday of each month and then regularly we’ll see you in about six months.