Hey everyone, today I wanted to take some time to give you a general update on me and the Library of Ohara. This isn’t a massive update announcing a bunch of projects or anything, but more of an update on how I’ve been doing across the past few months and how I’ll be heading forward with my content.

So as you might or might not have not known, the past few months have been filled with a lot of work on my end. As soon as I got back from Japan last year, I started work on this little project known as Return to the Reverie, with my talented friend ProfessorGemini. Work for it took a whopping 7 months, requiring a lot of daily work to bring the project to completion. Right after we finished it, we suddenly dived into a new project: maybe not all of you might’ve heard of it, but we decided to submit an original one-shot for the 100th Tezuka competition. I know it’s not exactly related much to the Library of Ohara or my content in general, but it is still something we both devoted a lot of time to. I’m incredibly glad I was able to bring both of these projects to fruition, it was legitimately a ton of fun to work on them, they ended up being such unique experiences! But… there is no denying how incredibly hard it was to accomplish such a feat.

Making manga… isn’t easy, I’m pretty sure most of you probably already know that, doubly so if you don’t have things such as editors, assistants, etc., having to do all the work yourself. I don’t want to come off like I’m victimizing myself or anything, but the work I’ve put into both of these projects, especially with Return to the Reverie, ended up being way more colossal and grueling than I ever first expected. To put an example, over the course of May, the month of finishing Return to the Reverie, I would wake up, get working on Return to the Reverie for the whole day, go to sleep, and repeat. All across the entirety of the month of May for every single day, without break. So as I finally wrapped up work on my one-shot just a couple of weeks ago, it really dawned on me just how exhausted I currently am. Working on manga like this for 10 months isn’t easy, especially for someone who has very weak health and constitution in general like me, so working on all these things certainly took a toll. Again, I don’t regret working on these projects, they were a lot of fun, I really mean that, but I definitely feel I need to take things easier for a moment.

So with that I think that I want to take a small break. Now, don’t panic! For you it probably doesn’t mean much, since not much will change. I still intend on doing Chapter Secrets every week, that’s something I’m very passionate about continuing. I’ll probably also cover things like the upcoming volume SBS, the upcoming Magazine, etc. as always. I don’t even intend this break to last for that long, only a few weeks. Really, me saying I’m taking a little break might even be redundant, as you might’ve not even noticed if I hadn’t told you. But I still want to be transparent about how my process goes creating content and I feel I have to be honest about how arduous the past few months have been for me. Being honest and transparent at all times is something I always strive for with my content. I’m not the type of guy who likes to put up appearances for the sake of having a public figure, I want to connect with everyone as earnestly as I can. I don’t bring this up much, mostly because I don’t like worrying others, but as I’ve mentioned a few times in the past I’m someone who doesn’t have the best physical health and I’ve been battling over the past few years against serious mental health issues, so it’s never been exactly the easiest for me to work hard on content and achieve everything I would love to, but I still try to do the best I can since I know working on these things can bring a lot of joy to me and others.

There’s a lot of other projects and content I want to work on right now. Mostly, beyond updating some stuff on the site, I want to dive more into YouTube, try some new things with it and interact more with the global OP community. There’s a lot of fantastic creators I already long since promised to collab with and I know it’s been a long time coming, but I’m also realizing I need to be in the right mindset if I want to be productive and so I need to rest up for a little while before I can get back into things, hence why I want to take it a little easier over the next few weeks. I’ve spent the entirety of summer working, so I want to take some time to enjoy what remains of summer in September! I’ve already started the break over the past few days relaxing and having fun, catching up on some anime I didn’t have time to watch over the past few months (I never expected Re:Zero to be this good!) and enjoying myself. Hopefully I can maybe even take a vacation and go somewhere to unwind for a bit. I hope that by the time Fall begins to settle in I can start focusing on some of the other content I wanted to work on and some of the changes I wanted to bring, but I’ve realized I need to be well rested and healthy to do that, so I’ll give myself the time needed to work on that. I can be a bit stubbornly workaholic at times, so I think it’s important to focus on myself from time to time as well.

The past few months have been filled with a lot of hardship for me. Not just in making Return to the Reverie and the one-shot (even if that was a big bulk of the work), but also working on other things both for my content and for my own life. It’s been a lot of hard work, some of it which hasn’t exactly been… the most pleasant. There’s also been other things happening across my personal life over the past few months that have been really hard on me as well, but… I feel specifically because I’ve been working so hard on these things and on overcoming these hardships that I’m continuously making my life better little by little. 2020 to me has been a sort of training arc, one where I’ve worked on a lot of projects I wanted to do for a long time and worked on improving myself for what’s to come ahead. There’s a lot of things that I want to do in 2021, mainly going back to Japan for a substantially longer time to properly take in the experience of what it feels like to live there, among a lot of other things. Overcoming these hardships has brought me a lot of joy and there’s this sensation of excitement and fun that I feel for what is to come in the near future of my life. Whether that’s for the things I want to achieve with my content or the things I want to achieve within my own personal life, there’s so much more I want to do! So I hope that wherever you feel you are headed in your own life, that we can share some experiences together!

Anyways, sorry for the sappy talk, as I said despite taking things a bit more easily, Chapter Secrets and the usual stuff isn’t going anywhere, so look forward to the analysis today. Take care!

P.S.: On a bit of a separate note, around this time marks the Library of Ohara turning 5 years old! Woo! Probably should’ve made that a bigger deal in this update but ah well. But yes, five whole years… I’ve grown so much since then, both in terms of my site growth and quite literally myself, so I feel incredibly humbled to have made it this far. Thank you to all of my Patreons for making it possible to sustain myself by doing this, thank you to all the friends and folks in the community that have helped me out, and thank you to everyone who tunes in to check out my content. Just knowing that you do that alone means so much to me. Seriously, thank you. Love you all!