Not harsh, that’s an accurate description I agree with for the most part. 

I consider this to be a second job, basically, so I write every day, usually 2000-3000 words, if I can manage it. I don’t always, since I have a full time job on top of this, naturally, but how do I find the time? I literally have no life! Well, that’s not quite true I suppose, but I go to work in the morning, I come home, I write for a good chunk of the afternoon, and go to bed fairly early so I can go to work the next day. I suppose that might sound miserable, but I love writing this stuff, and so it’s just how I’ve chosen to spend my time.

That said, that’s not really the best advice, so here’s some things I’ve done that have helped me not breakdown and burnout.

1. How Much Do You Want to Write? – This is the first step. Figure out how often you would like to post. To give you an idea of the sort of commitments I have, as far as writing is concerned, each month I post four 1000ish word tumblr posts a week. I do three captions (about 500 words each, or a bit less). I also complete about 10,000 words of commissions at least, which may or may not overlap with those tumblr posts. All in all, that’s about 25,000 words a month, give or take. That’s a lot. That’s a short novel every two or three months. You won’t be able to try that, of course, but look at how much you’ve been posting, and feel yourself out. Could you write more? Do you feel over taxed? You should undershoot your expectations–you can always write more, but try to avoid burning out–it’s not fun.
2. Set a Schedule – This is so important. Figure out how much you want to write, and then decide when, and how often, you want to post. Keep traffic on the site in mind–I post my stuff in the afternoon because that’s high traffic. I used to post at midnight (pacific time, keep time zones in mind too), and would get much less engagement. Same with days of the week. The more regularly you post, the easier an audience will be able to follow you without having to work too hard.
3. Buffer Buffer Buffer! – Nevermind, this is the most important thing. I usually have my tumblr posts already written two weeks out, and I try and have an extra week of content in my back pocket should something go really awry. There are weeks where I can’t manage to write anything. There are weeks when I triple my usual output. I never know what kind of week I’m going to have, so the appearance of regularity is only there because of my sizable buffer. Build up a buffer first, before committing to a schedule–don’t try to build one up on the fly. It never works.
4. Set a Daily Goal – Once you have a buffer built up, never stop. Seriously–don’t stop. Every day, write. Even if it’s 100 words. Even if it’s just planning out an idea for a story. It doesn’t matter–write. Think about writing. But do more of the writing than the thinking, we can’t post thoughts yet. Start small with your goals, and then work your way up. 
5. Figure Out What Motivates You –  These tips may or may not work for you–all I can say is that they worked for me in the past. They motivate me, in part, because I’m an obliger–I hate disappointing people, once I’ve made them a commitment. A public schedule then, works really well for me, because I feel like shit if I don’t meet it. That may not work for you at all! You have to figure out a system that works for you as well as this one works for me, but this is a framework you can start with, at least. 

I’m glad you enjoyed the commentary I posted (For anyone who missed who might be curious, you can find it here.) I’ve always wanted to give a bit more context to my stories, especially how they form, and those pictures are something I’ve always wanted to share, but have never quite found a good way to display them. As for your initial question, regarding picture placement, I’m actually going to blame tumblr for this one, and go off on a rant tangent. 

The system of Tumblr is a strange one, and there’s a lot of quirks regarding various aspects of the platform which make it not very friendly to anyone who both wants flexibility with the kind of content they produce, and also make sure people are given proper credit for photos.The ability to reblog a photo is great (assuming people will do even that, rather than just post it themselves) but it comes with some problems. While you can add text to a photo, you can’t add more photos to a reblog. You can add more photos inline underneath, but you can’t easily provide a way for those photos to link back to a source like a reblog does (assuming the source is even accurate, and not a theft itself). 

Another issue with reblogging is that the stats related to a reblog are incomplete. When I post an original post, my likes and reblogs that I see reflect every single like and reblog that post gets, regardless of distance. However, when reblogging, you only see likes and reblogs which relate directly to your reblogged post. It would make more sense, in my opinion, to calculate likes/reblogs from the tree you create. That makes it hard to judge reach or popularity when all you do is reblog.

I solved this problem by reposting photo sets for a long time, and attaching captions to them. This wasn’t foolproof by any means, people could still easily delete my caption while the photo continued onward, alone. Recently, with the addition of photos in text posts that actually look nice, I could even solve that problem, but at this point I’m just not that comfortable reposting photos that I don’t know I have permission to use. 

To be honest, I’m not even happy just reblogging photos–I’ve had a few too many awkward encounters with the people in the photos attached to my story taking issue with the story’s content, which isn’t surprising. This problem has only gotten worse, the more reach these two blogs have. At the same time, I don’t have the time to contact every single individual in a photo to run an idea by them and get explicit permission–it would be easier to just not do anything involving photos at all! And that’s what I did, for quite a while. 

I’m doing photo captions again, but I’m still a bit uneasy about it. I could go back to reposting photos in line, perhaps with links to the original posts on tumblr. I’d rather tumblr just fix it, so I could turn a photo into a text post, or imbed a reblog within the body of a story. But these are specialized desires, and I doubt they would be important enough to implement. Copyright and permission on the internet is a terrible rats nest anyway, but I’d rather not make it worse, even though I know everyone likes photo stories. For the moment, this is the compromise I’ll settle for, I think. 

tl;dr I probably won’t be doing many stories with inline photos, until I figure out a way to cover my copyright ass, or tumblr implements tools to make it easier to do so.