I fully understand if it’s impossible but do you plan on finishing this project?
Hi to you and everyone else still following this blog. It's probably been what, almost two years since I last posted anything?
Short answer: probably not, though I want to.
Long answer: So a lot happened. I got my laptop back after the water damage and everything was wiped. Everything. Not just TB. I DID have some backups of the raws for volume 5, but I lost the rest of the completed pages that I'd been working on which put me back several weeks. Combine that with the stress of starting a new semester of college with a broken laptop, in a new place, with COVID messing everything up... I basically lost all motivation to keep working on TB. Time passed and I got more and more guilty about not posting, so I told myself that I would just work in larger batches that meant when I did post, I could post a ton in order to make up for all the time when I did not. Of course, that started to stress me out too, and so all it meant was that I kept delaying everything even more because the idea of doing MORE than usual after being gone so long was so daunting I couldn't bring myself to make the first step. Time passed. I got a job and was doing both school and work, which took a lot of time, and ended up committed to a group that took 9 hours per week minimum. The semester went by, and the next, and then was my final semester and my thesis. Keep everything from before and add in *that* time commitment...
By the time I was ready to get back to TB, I'd graduated. And my school pulled my Photoshop license basically the second my diploma was in hand. Buying Photshop will take me $22-35 a month, and Adobe is so weird with their commitments and forcing you to keep it for a long time or putting a cancelation fee on you that I keep worrying I'll miss something in the fine print and end up having to pay way more than anticipated. So basically, trying to get Photoshop back would cost a lot of money that I don't exactly want to pay given how long I think it'll take me to do these scans. It's just me working on this. There is no one else. I have a lot of things I want to do in my life, and paying for another year or two of Photoshop will put me out a few hundred bucks that I would like to put in savings. I guess I could really buckle down and try to get huge chunks done at once, but I need some other life things to calm down a bit.
If this seems like excuses excuses...yeah. pretty much. I have a million excuses and none of them are great. I loved this project and it brought me a lot of joy, but now I've come to a financial decision that has kept me from coming back to this.
That and the other big thing, which was the idea of "Oh. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this." Because while I may not be earning any money by doing this, I'm also not paying anything to do this. The profits aren't going to CLAMP or anyone official. People are reading their material without them earning a single penny. And sure, I read every CLAMP manga I've ever read on unofficial online sites before buying them myself (so, I read without paying before I fell so in love that I did). But should I be doing this? What happens if CLAMP or whoever owns the licensing does a crackdown one day?
I'm already so far in it probably doesn't matter. I'm not going to go delete everything I've ever posted. So why not just finish what I started?
I think it comes down to shoving down the guilt of the absence and the worry of whether I should or shouldn't be doing this and figuring out financially (and time-wise) if it's truly worth it. Like I said, I loved this project. I love TB. I have a ton of fun making the pages. But it takes a lot. It will take more from me now than it ever has with the added financial burden and the fact that I have way more commitments than I did when I started (which was, I think, actually in high school. And here I am now with a college degree and a real world job).
So that's the long answer: Will I finish this? I don't know. I really want to. I just need to figure out a way to make it work. That'll require some shuffling on my part. Some figuring stuff out. Some weighing my options. I can't say yes because I don't want to promise something and not give it, which has historically been what I've done when promising more frequent updates that never increased in frequency.
So to both you and the few other people who've messaged me in this long gap, or to the ones who said such nice things when I first mentioned my broken laptop and losing everything and all the kind of sucky stuff that happened nearly 2 years ago now...Thank you for caring. It does mean a lot. It's really nice to know that people actually appreciated the effort I put in, and that they're still thinking about me (or at least, about what I can do for them). I've never stopped thinking about this blog. I used Photoshop for my thesis and every time I opened it I told myself, "maybe next time I open this will be for TB." It even was. I think I did one more set at some point, never posted because of that thing I mentioned about feeling guilty and wanting to make a mega post.
With that I'll finish off for now. Apologies for the giant blob of text. I don't feel like proofreading this right now. I still have stuff I need to get done today. Real life calls. I hope that one day I will be able to get back to this. I'm just not sure when, or if it's even feasible.
