Ghost Town Anxiety

I am officially tired of waiting for me to finish my latest Mega Man video. I mean, c'mon. I released a teaser for my video series of Mega Man 6 in September of 2010, and a new installment arrived every month for the next four months. Then there were some serious delays, and it took three months before I was ready with Part 5 of 6. That was the beginning of April. It's now the beginning of August, four months later, and I'm not even halfway through with Part 6. That's too long, man!

I receive e-mail updates about new comments on my channel, and I log in every 1d4 days or so to get caught up on responding to them. As discussed before, I stay pretty active online, and the frequent discussions I have with my friends and subscribers keeps my channel from feeling like I've abandoned it. Channels that go a few months without a new video can quickly become like ghost towns, and the fact that I've still got people hanging around after all this time is both surprising and wonderful, and it's helping to encourage me to keep at it.

I checked in during my lunch break on Thursday, and after leaving a few comments of my own, I felt this inexplicable urge to do something--update my video descriptions; change my playlist thumbnails; revise my list of other games I plan to record in the future. Anything. There's been a relative lack of deep, thought-provoking conversations recently, and I've been staring at the same pictures on my channel for a long time. I wasn't hanging out in a community; I suddenly felt this sensation that I was running a ghost town with tourists.

I'm sure that's not how the tourists perceived things, but I still couldn't shake the feeling that my channel desperately needed a new video to jumpstart conversations. I desperately needed a new video to have something else to look at.

I was tremendously enthusiastic during my most recent recording session, but though I had the time and energy to keep going, I had run out of things to say. It was necessary to take a break to give my thoughts time to simmer, but I didn't want to break. Now I was getting antsy to get back to recording, even if I had nothing to blab about. I needed to be done with this video, if not for my fans then for myself.

I'm looking forward to recording the rest of this video, but I'm also looking ahead to the future. There will no doubt be videos in the future that I'm just as excited about, or take just as long to record. Yet I'll never get through the rest of the series if I don't get through this one installment first, and I can't fully focus on my other side projects if I drop everything else at the slightest indication of satisfactory recording conditions.

What I need is a weekend. Just a Saturday or Sunday to myself to start recording in the morning, take a break for lunch, keep recording, take a break to do something else, keep recording, and then find a finished product by bedtime, if not sooner.

Summer, it seems, is not the time of year to expect to have a weekend to yourself. I've enjoyed the opportunities to see friends, family, and fiancée, but that time has been interspersed with the necessities of getting everything in order after moving, plus an awful lot of travel time. If it were just fun time spent with people, I'd be energized for recording during the week, but it's also been lots of driving and unpacking boxes/filling out forms/standing in line/waiting on hold/following up on phone calls and e-mails/restocking on supplies/washing and putting away all the clothes and dishes that were clean before you moved. That'll take a lot out of you.

But all anyone wants out of me is a new video, including myself.

I think I may have inadvertently become a fan of my own work, and now I'm impatiently clamoring toward myself for more. I think I need to watch this again, before I smack myself.