How Triumphant Artists might escape its current state of slowly unfolding crisis:

Right now, there's a sort of 'implosion in slow motion' taking place on my web network. You probably notice the symptoms even if you don't see how they connect to each other in a vicious cycle.

Simply put, I have a lot of projects that don't move forward at all, or only move in fits and starts, because they are unfunded, and what little funding I could scrape together to inch them forward cost a lot of my time, which adds to the slow-moving backlog. I'm running some numbers here, and it seems to me that at the rate things are moving overall, the roadmap I had posted for 2016 is perhaps far too optimistic.

I'm struggling to achieve a breakthrough.  I have been for years, but with little success.  A handful of my less popular websites are being folded into bigger, more busy ones now, their content relocated.  This has ended up not being as drastic as it sounds.  HornbostelMedia.com and GalileeGames.com are both back up and running.  A couple of model railroading related domains have closed permanently, however.

THE GAPING CHASM OF FUNDING, AND HOW I'LL TRY TO FIX IT:

My (discretionary) margin of income - the amount I can set aside to work on my own projects - is currently just below $1000/year.

The assorted creative projects I'm hoping to finish will cost about $7000, combined.  At that pace, it'll take me at least 7 more years to finish everything I'd like to finish.

If funding didn't pose an obstacle, if I could somehow acheive a success in the next 90 days that raised a lot, and if as a result, I didn't have to siphon off so much time to sub-minimum wage gigs, I think then the 2016 roadmap would be realistic.  I could have all this stuff released by the end of 2018 (as opposed to 2022 or 2023 or later).

In an effort to make all that funding somehow happen, I've paused the bigger efforts like 'Isola' and 'Panoramic Worlds' and am focusing on game-jam style projects that small in scope, not expensive, and can be done within 10-20 days each.

The first such effort, a minigame called 'Spiral Skies', will hit Itch.IO, Kongregate, Newgrounds, and PanoramicWorlds.com, fairly soon.  It has proven more difficult to complete than I would like, but I'm still working on it.   I'm restructuring a lot of the game, tweaking graphics to fit cleanly into the spritesheets, and implementing graphics loading & unloading, in an effort to reduce the maximum memory usage used by the program from 120mb to 72mb or less.  Mostly what this means is that hours of additional work are needed, so that lower-end mobile devices will have less difficulty running the game. 

Then there's my comics - I complete the Troop 4 comics content and release a few chapters of Another Road Taken.  Both comic-book items will be available online and as physical booklets sold on eBay.  I'll also be posting some more articles in this section.

I'm also beginning a full-blown Etsy effort, making a bunch of artworks & prints and listing them on Etsy for sale.

Fourth move is the launch of a few N-scale model railroad building products for sale on eBay.

If none of those efforts succeed in generating anything, that's a real shame, but it is typical of many of my ventures so far.  I've got a long, long track record of hard work, creative ideas executed as well as I could manage, and very little to show for any of them [in terms of business success anyways].  Triumphant is not really the best word for me so far, but maybe if one of these next four intensive ventures does well, it could still be.  In the meantime, if you're interested in seeing my projects move forward, please consider buying an original, handmade, very cheaply priced artwork from me through the eBay section of this website.   Especially consider the fixed price items that are above 99 cents.