Harvest Time Part Four

Each year at the Harvest Moon I take some time to assess the state of the site and what is going to happen with it in the next year.

The main thing I learned this year is that I’m not capable of filling this site with just short posts.

In the past few years I have continually said I’m going to focus less on creating content for the site. Last year’s Harvest post said that in 2020 the site’s content would be reserved for “shorter and stupider” posts. But the posts have pretty much remained the same length and are no more or less stupid than they always were. For whatever reason I’m having a hard time transitioning the site to just goofball shit, despite my stated intentions.

And—as I mentioned in a previous post—I’m still not sure why I thought going from 12 posts a month to 20 and from 4 newsletters a year to 10 was going to cut down on my workload. Like, I literally haven’t a fucking clue where I was even coming from with that idea. I guess I was thinking it was going to be 20 really short posts a month? I think that was the plan.

The only reason this scheduling ended up working this year was because the time I would normally spend performing was cut off drastically due to coronavirus. Probably by at least 80%. Fortunately this didn’t impact anything I had planned too much because this year’s book for supporters doesn’t really include new tricks. Instead it’s a collection of presentational techniques—ones that I’ve worked on for years. So I didn’t have to workshop much of anything new.

We also haven’t done any new testing this year since the coronavirus situation, so that has freed up many hours that hopefully won’t be free next year.

But the lack of performing and testing has led to a backlog of tricks that I’ve created in the past 6 months that I haven’t been able to put in front of people yet. So when things do get more back to normal I will have to devote a larger chunk of time to performing in order to catch back up.

I know most of you are like, “That’s fine, Andy. You do what you need to do when you need to do it.” I receive almost no pressure from the supporters of this site, thankfully. The reason I write these posts is more to help myself better understand where things are, than to try and justify it to anyone else.

So if the supporters fund another year of the site in 2021, the only change will probably be in the posting schedule and the newsletter schedule. Exactly what that change will be, I don’t know yet, but I will be pulling back a little on both to free up more performing and experimenting time that wasn’t needed this year.

To answer the question I get most often:

“Will you be adding more supporter slots?”

No. A small number of slots are added every year organically because the book printer always prints a certain number of books over the number I request, just to make sure they have enough copies to deliver should anything go wrong. And any extra books are offered on a first-come/first-serve basis to people who have emailed me and asked to be on the waiting list. Buying one of those “overage” copies, also opens up a supporter slot for them. But other than those few that come about naturally each year, I will not be adding more slots.

As for the 2020 rewards package, everything is coming along nicely. The next book should be finished in about 6 weeks and then ready to ship to supporters in early 2021. And I just got the first rough sketches for what the next Jerx deck #4 will look. It’s going to be really stupid!