Summer Status Update

Hey all! There have been a lot of changes for me over the last year, from moving twice, figuring out a new job in a new city, helping my husband with his job as well, tumblr collapsing, and so on and so forth. For the most part, all I’ve been trying to do is keep up with the general churn of content without falling too far behind on anything, and I feel like, for the most part, I succeeded. But with that year behind me now, with some time to think, and with a new site on a new platform, I want to talk about how my posting schedule is going to look going forward. To start with, though, I want to step back in time a bit to when I set up my Patreon, and what I was hoping for my writing at the time.

I work full time, but I love writing. At the time I set up the Patreon, things were a bit…easier. My husband was providing health insurance for us both through his work, and I hoped that as my Patreon scaled up, I would be able to reduce my own workload to some extent, and devote more time to writing instead–but things haven’t panned out like that at all over the years. Instead, my husband has struggled with a number of jobs, and at present I am tied to full time work both as a dependable source of income, and much more importantly, to provide health insurance for us both.

Anyway! What that means, is that the amount of time I have to work on my writing is fixed–there’s just no way for me to scale down my day job to provide more content, not as things will stand for the foreseeable future. This isn’t a huge problem–I still have enough time to produce content, and I’ve been working with essentially this load for years now–however, that’s not to say that there isn’t a crunch!

That crunch occurs between my longer form stories, and the shorter content I usually post on a daily basis, like interactive stories and captions. I just don’t have the time and energy to be able to produce reliable short form content, and at the same time, produce the long form stories that I have rolling around in my head. For a long time, I was able to make this work by posting long form stories as short form content–by breaking long stories into short chunks, and posting them serially, but the format was frustrating, and not something I want to return to, because I feel it disrupts the flow of the story too much. It was mostly a conceit designed for tumblr’s platform, but now that I’m hosting through wordpress, is makes even less sense to post long stories in short chunks, rather than by chapter, or in their entirety. However, I still want to provide some sort of regular content for everyone, especially because that’s something I’m somewhat known for! It’s a bit of a pickle, honestly.

Going forward, I’m going to be trying a new way to balance this out. Instead of trying to produce everything at once and trying to post both short content and long content and focusing on having something up every single day, I really need to be able to focus on one or the other, in order to get into a better workflow with less frustration. That means, when I’m working on longer pieces, there are, from now on, going to be fewer, but longer posts each week (Probably three to four) and when I take breaks between stories, I’ll post regular short captions and sketches instead (probably five to seven days a week, depending on various life circumstances). All in all, it adds up to the same amount of words each week–around 6000-7000, just delivered in different forms, depending on what I’m working on. I think it’s a better work life balance for me, and delivers a better quality of work for all of you, without completely sacrificing the regularity of my schedule. It has the bonus effect of making all of my writing easier to categorize, tag, and read as well.

I hope to switch modes with some regularity, hopefully every month to month and a half, to make sure content stays fresh, and to not keep people waiting for what they want for too long. The one constant feature I hope to run is the interactive stories. I’ve been enjoying those, and it seems like you all are as well, so those will be constant–with one or two updates a week, depending on workload at the moment. The other thing that won’t change at all is bonus Patreon content. Suggested stories, for example, will still happen each month, as they always have. 

Another benefit of this, is that it lets me structure months around commissions as well. I can open up for four or six weeks at a time for short commissions, and simply post them as I finish them, instead of trying to write them and keep up with the regular grind as well–hopefully, the first commission month will be soon, in the late summer or early fall.

I’m in the middle of a long story right now, so July is going to be long format, as I keep working on “Straight Town.” After that–well, we’ll see! I haven’t tried something like this before, so there will probably be some kinks as things go along. Thanks for your patience and your support over the years. If you have any questions, you can comment below, find me on Patreon, on twitter, on discord, email etc., and I’ll answer them all to the best of my ability. Thanks for reading!