The effect on the EVE Online script, however, was much more dire. I had promised Crowd Control Productions that I would show the first three hours of my new video there so that I could gather feedback from the most dedicated players, but shortly before I began editing, it was pointed out to me that I relied far too heavily upon a single source to the point that I had unwittingly effected a massive act of plagiarism.
The only reasonable solution was to excise half of what I had written, and the next two months were a scramble to put together something new so that I could have something presentable for Fanfest. I did little other than work during that period, and many of my friends wondered to where I had disappeared.
When I returned from my trip to Iceland, I was demolished. Whenever I attempted to sit down to write the script, the anxiety and private embarrassment borne from my secret act of plagiarism would appear. The majority of this script has been written with trembling hands and a heightened heart rate, and progress was slow due to difficulty focusing. My hands shake now as I write this.
There were interludes where I could write larger bodies of script, and the previous release estimates were based on those periods, but I found that they were unsustainable, and the date continued to be pushed back not due to the scale of the video, but due to my mounting anxiety. As I continued to miss deadlines set for myself, my overwhelming embarrassment precluded any public announcement in my mind, and this increased the anxiety around writing. The feedback loop has persisted until today.
