Thank you all for your posts. I've read them all finally (yay for a good read).
Sadly though I ain't feeling very confident now with these replies. 'Git good' isn't something I feel I can do before that contest ends. I can't afford to go to school anymore for any classes...I'm barely making enough money to survive as is, and soon I might not be making any money at all...(which in turn might kill my comic as well...)
I kinda already DO the batchwork...but it takes me like ALL DAY to sketch out a mere 15-16 panels...just to SKETCH mind you. Not line. To make 35 plus, I'd need at least another day or two out of the week just to draw them out. And we've not even gotten to the next stages of linework and color, backgrounds, dialogue...I already feel like I've taken shortcuts too. I know the keyboard/tablet shortcuts, I know how to copy and paste similar poses and just change the expressions...but it seems like I just am not good enough or fast enough...
I do a buffer of about 4 pages, but a buffer will mean little to nothing in the long run if I can't produce pages faster than I upload them (I know I could take hiatuses, but my comic had to take two large ones already...one recently even due to a data crash that actually made me lose several of the completed pages. I hate hiatus. I hate stalling my story). As much as I would love to work on my comic full-time, I can't...Saturday and Sunday is when I work my REAL job...the one that I wish I could replace with doing my comic full-time. But I can't work on my comic full-time unless I'm getting paid enough for it...but I guess I can't get paid for it because I can't dedicate enough time to it? Well I guess I'm in a loophole then...
It's sounding like everything is closing up around me and not letting me ever consider my comic to be good enough for a full-time paid series. Maybe I should not bother with the contest...I was hoping it could be the jumpstart I needed to being able to quit my weekend job and go full-time should my comic win...but now it sounds like I'm just not good enough for it...