Good morning, afternoon, evening – whenever you’re reading this, and wherever you are in the world. This is my third monthly dev journal where I get to write a wall of text about what’s going on with me lately. Every month around the beginning of the month, I’ll try to post one of these. 😉

This month’s entry is about working two jobs. For me, that is working as a network admin, and also working as a VN developer. And how it affects literally everything. I am not the only developer that does this, in fact quite a few devs have a ‘normal’ job outside of developing games. And I guess some of our followers may not fully grasp just how difficult it can be to juggle job 1, job 2, home life, and social life. So, I’m going to go over how each of those things affects me, and especially how it can take a toll on Serenity development – especially the writing side of it.

So, we’ll start with ‘job 1’, which is my normal, full-time job as a network admin. For this job, luckily, I mostly work from my home office. This is actually quite a nice benefit since it keeps me close to my big PC rig where I can also work on Serenity. But that only works out when things aren’t very busy at job 1. Let’s take the last two weeks as an example…

It’s Monday, February 21st, 2022. I wake up in the morning, take all the dogs out (I have 5 dogs – yeah, blame my wife and daughter for that chaos). Fix a cup of coffee, then sit at my desk and fire up my work laptop as well as my personal PC. No emails or messages from work, looks like it will be a quiet Monday for a change. So, I turn towards my own PC and fire up Atom (used to code Serenity). At this point, I’m still trying to write the last few hundred lines of dialogue. I skim through the last few lines, then start to type the next line where I left off. Phone rings. We have a site down. Local network is shot. Check network switch and one of the main ports has shut itself down because the switch has detected a loop in the network. Welp… looks like it won’t be a quiet Monday after all.

I spent pretty much that whole week, along with my manager, searching a huge site for some misconnected network switch under a desk somewhere. We find and resolve it finally when we end up having to go in on Saturday with no one there, which allowed us to shut down sections of the facility and isolate the problem area. We couldn’t do that with everyone there.

The entire week were late nights up at the site, only a few hours of sleep per night and back at it the next morning. We thought the issue was resolved after that. No. On Wednesday last week, the shit happened again. This time in the warehouse. To cut this short – we went through the same thing again but managed to find and resolve another problem over this weekend. Before this last event, I had managed to finish the dialogue at least. But I still ended up much further behind where I hoped I would be by now.

See, that’s just how it is. Unfortunately, until the day I make enough doing job 2 (VN Dev), job 1 has to be priority. The crazy thing is… sometimes we can go several weeks with no events at all. So, there are good, quiet times too where I can work on Serenity. And yes, of course I work on the game after work. But as a network admin, work can be at any time. This is all just my work… not my complete day. Trying to do the tedious job of creating scenes, writing them, and coding is very difficult without some peace and quiet and I don’t always have that either. Dealing with dogs throughout the day among other things… well, there are any number of things that pull me away. Not to forget falling ill at times, losing loved ones (I lost 2 in the last year), and then there is the biggest issue… depression.

With all the negativity in the world and in my life at times, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I fight my own form of depression. This manifests itself as sleepless nights, no energy during the day, and losing the will or even interest in working on Serenity. It sometimes gets to a point that when something is too hard or I can’t figure out how to do something in my game, I just turn it all off and go watch some anime or even take a nap. And it’s due to frustration… anger. I had to really push myself to even do this project and grow balls enough to put it out there for the world to see. It’s almost like standing up in front of a crowd and singing. I developed a bit of anxiety at the start of this and that made me very defensive towards people who criticized my work. I had to really fight the urge to get ugly in F95 forums. And one day, I just made myself only respond as politely as I can in those situations.

One of the criticisms I’ve seen mentioned a lot is that bad situations in Serenity get resolved too quickly. Yep, they do. And they would, wouldn’t they? Just read above and you might understand why. Trying to write tension into a story when you just want something happy is extremely difficult for me. One day, I stopped caring about that particular critique. I don’t care if tension gets resolved quickly because that is what I want to see happen in real life… in MY real life… and in YOURS. I wrote Serenity several years ago, well before I even knew AVN’s were a thing. I discovered AVN’s while looking for something cool to read. I wasn’t looking for porn. It kind of found me. I found that some of these porn stories actually had some romance and happiness in them. As much sex as there is in Serenity, I really didn’t care about the sex. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy having it in there. I made slight changes to my original draft of Serenity to make it have more ‘porn’ in it because well… here was a community of people who might actually enjoy my story. I had no other outlet for my creativity. So, here I am.

Anyway, as you can see, old N2 isn’t all happy all the time. I deal with a lot. There is so much more that I am not ready to reveal here, stuff on a much more personal level. Just know that I have good reason for writing a mostly happy story. Excuse the fact that I deal with ‘bad guys’ swiftly and fiercely. Because I wish to wipe the bad away at will. MC is a God. He lives my own fantasy… to be able to do whatever I want with a thought. To make people happy with a wave of my hand and a bit of ‘fade’ magic. To dream it… and so, make it reality. Write it, and they will come. Write it, and it will come true. I’m all love, all the time. Serenity is my own fantasy, and hopefully yours too. It may not be the best written thing out there, but it’s mine and yours – if you like it too.

I love you guys…
…Fire