Why so few articles lately? And why not on Saturdays? A quick rundown
Hello dear readers! For those of you who follow me on Reddit or Discord, you probably know a fair bit already about why I’ve suddenly been posting fewer articles. This is for those of you who aren’t in the know. Don’t worry, it’s not anything bad.
By early this spring, I was still producing articles at a rate of one every one to two weeks, plus podcast episodes, and with the length of my articles ever increasing, I was at the end of my rope. Burnout threatened, so I decided it was time to take a different approach preemptively, before I actually snapped.
The fact is that at the rate I was producing articles previously, I lacked the time and energy to take on really influential cases like KAL 007, or, coming soon, American Eagle flight 4184 (which totally changed the way the aviation industry thought about ice, and the amount of reading material I’ve assembled for myself on the topic is probably pushing 1,000 pages). The Boeing 737 rudder hardover crashes are also looming on the horizon and that will be another major project requiring one month of work or more.
Consequently, I switched from a regular release schedule to a “release when I’m done” schedule. This has greatly improved not only my mental health but also the quality of the articles.
The advantage of this is that I no longer feel that I’m rushing my final products, and I’ve allowed the scope of each project to broaden, to the point that I can now write 9,000+ words about a crash like Air Algérie flight 702P, whereas previously it would have been 5 or 6 thousand. Under the previous schedule, my 26,000-word KAL 007 piece would have been completely impossible.
Keep in mind also that the work for a new podcast episode is similar in scope to a new article, and takes almost as much time and energy. We try to release one episode a month in addition to what I’m already writing.
And on top of that, I now have a second job that I can’t share the details of right now, but it involves — you guessed it — researching and writing about plane crashes.
Releasing fewer articles has slowed the growth of my Patreon somewhat, although steady growth from the podcast and the second job have more than made up for that. I wholeheartedly thank everyone who continues to contribute even when they’re only receiving one article a month lately. Creating content about plane crashes is my full-time job and I rely on this income; I’m not secretly raking in a salary from somewhere else.
If you want weekly and sometimes daily updates about the progress of my next article so you can plan your life around it, I highly recommend regularly checking this reddit post, or following me on Twitter, or following me on Bluesky if that’s more your speed.
As a reminder, if you subscribe to my Patreon you can also join a Discord server where I regularly hang out and talk about my progress.
All of the changes lately have ensured that my content creation process is sustainable in the very long term. Slowing down isn’t a sign of decreased interest or will; on the contrary, it represents an effort to ensure I can keep creating new content for years to come without killing myself in the process, and without suppressing my desire for ever-increasing detail, scope, and quality.
As for the immediate future, I’ll be posting an interim article on a more obscure crash around July 1st, after which I’m going on vacation with some friends, but an extremely long and detailed article on American Eagle flight 4184 will follow later in July.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this update clues you in to what’s going on in the world of Admiral Cloudberg! See you for the next one!
— Kyra
