HOLY SHIT YOU"RE ALIVE!!! So what's the main thing that got you MIA all these years?
The 6 year hiatus explained
Many things in my life has changed in the time since I first started work on Treehouse ch. 13:
Becoming a parent, getting my master's degree, starting a PhD, dropping out of said PhD, looking for a job during covid lockdown, working a full-time job, building and moving into a house, and generally growing older and less energetic.
With all that, it has been hard to find the time and the motivation at the same time to sit down and draw, and the state of the new chapter of Treehouse itself was not helping.
As you may be able to tell from ch. 13, the story has now reached its first really major turning point, which will set off the overarching plot and several character arcs. I came to a point where I was deeply unsatisfied with what I'd come up with for the continuation, and I hit a hard writer's block trying to figure out how to proceed.
All of this together made it demotivating to even open up the Manga Studio project file, so progress simply stopped happening, leaving the chapter not even half done for years. And then, 2½ weeks ago in the middle of my summer vacation, the stars somehow aligned, and I figured it out and finished the chapter at a — for my standard — blinding pace.
I don't think the motivation was suddenly granted to me by divine intervention, but it was rather the result of many small sources of inspiration accumulating enough + realizing and accepting that I had to kill some darlings (I ended up having to redraw several already finished panels and even deleting a whole, fully sketched page!).
I feel really good about Treehouse right now. My daily life feels well-balanced and calm, and I have more clarity about the series than ever before. I have developed a process and workflow that I think works really well for me, and most importantly, I am having FUN!
I'm currently writing the script for the next 3 chapters, and I can't wait to start drawing them ✨
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