Dropping the blogging milestones (Patreon)

Hello, friends!  Thank you so much for all your support.  This has been the greatest, most creative, most productive year of my life, and it's all thanks to you.  💟

I've removed all the milestones.  That is, I'm shedding the obligation to write X posts each month (though I have one last post almost done to finish up November).  I've stumbled into a couple problems with this setup.

The biggest is that I'm trying to seriously write a book (or two) now, and also writing for a blog saps my limited reserve of Prose Mana.  I've even written a couple blog posts based on things I already decided I wanted to put in my book, because I needed something to fill the month.  This seems counterproductive — not only do I end up writing the same thing twice, but the book is now slightly further delayed and perhaps slightly less valuable as a whole.

Also, I tend to get ridiculously ambitious and pour the better part of a week into multi-thousand-word deep dives.  I enjoy writing those, but there are only four weeks in a month, and I have to write four posts per month, and that math isn't working out so well.

But hey!  The primary goal of blogging milestones was to get me to write more, and by that ruler I think they were a smashing success.  My blog is now sort of A Thing, rather than a barren website I post on three times a year, and that's honestly kind of incredible.  I don't know if it would've happened without this elaborate self-imposed rule "forcing" me to write more.

So rest assured, I will keep writing!  But I'd like to write more about the stuff I'm working on, which means I need a little more time to be working on that stuff, and a little less in the way of quotas.

I suspect the results will be better overall, too.  All of my own favorite posts have been written on a whim, not scrounged up for a deadline.  With any luck, I'll even reach my secondary goal of writing more shorter things — something that's been harder than expected after setting such a high initial bar for myself.  I suspect a lot of what I write is somewhat inaccessible due to sheer length, and that's a shame.

Also, to somewhat make up for this, I'm going to write monthly patron-only status updates as a sort of longer-form version of the weekly roundups I do now.  So there'll finally be something cool and exclusive for you to read.  And with any luck, I'll get a draft of something done before the end of the year, so that $4 tier will finally get something of its very own.  Ha ha, ha...  Look, okay, not immediately blabbing everything on Twitter doesn't exactly come naturally to me—

If you oppose this, if you pledged only to turn me into an unstoppable blogging machine, I totally understand!  You can cancel your pledge in the next few days and no one will be the wiser.  But I'm hoping that you're paying my salary in the first place because you trust that I'll produce something interesting one way or another.  And oh, I can guarantee you, I will.

Also, I replaced the wall of text on my landing page, and you should maybe take a look at it.