Book 11 complete and upcoming break (Patreon)

TL;DR:

Book 11 is complete for silver rank and above patrons

Chapters will continue until the end of the month

There is a poll to gauge community opinion on how the break should happen

Chapter 882 marks the end of book 11. Chapters will continue to come out as normal until the end of the month.

I built up a chapter buffer over the December break and they proved extremely useful as I have had a very busy year. I will be taking April off, although I will be working through most of it to rebuild my chapter buffer. Then I'm taking my brother and his family to Disneyworld.How I handle the Patreon through April is still an open question. I have two options, the first of which is to pause the billing as I have done in the past. This should be the simple option, but that has demonstrably not been the case. As many of you know, and have had to deal with, this causes many, many, many billing issues that I spend a month after each break dealing with. Losing chapter access, getting double charged and countless other problems have plagued patrons during and after breaks.

The second option is to do something I did with my first break, years ago now. I leave the Patreon up, release one chapter per week and people can opt out of the month if they don't want to pay for the reduced release rate over April. This was an approach I moved away from because I was on the old schedule back then so I burned out hard and needed breaks to stop myself from going insane. That is no longer the case with the new schedule and my mental health is much better.

I will be open right now that I am very much leaning towards option two, for now and in the future. Not only does it reduce the technical problems but it also makes any future breaks more flexible if I follow this pattern again. If I pause billing, it locks me into calendar months. If I have more flexibility, I can take a week to visit my mum, or a couple of weeks for a holiday.

That being said, if the community is seriously against this approach, I will will rethink it. As such, here is a poll to see what you all think.