The Marshmallow Ranch Gazette (Patreon)

Howdy, Patrons!

I know it's been pretty quiet around these parts for the past two weeks -- sorry about that. The last part of "Gift Exchange" was a little more difficult to write than I thought, and while I'm still not happy with it I was determined NOT to let another week go by without presenting it to my extraordinarily patient Husband, The Dragon. He's read it, he approves, and now I'll be posting it up here shortly. Hooray!!

However, lateness on January's serial means that I'm also late bringing you February's serial, "Stable Love". To make up for it, I'll be posting THREE story parts this week: "Gift Exchange" part 4 today, "Stable Love" part 1 tomorrow, and "Stable Love" part 2 on Thursday. We'll resume our regular schedule next Thursday with part 3, with the finale rounding out the month.

Going back over "Stable Love", I'm really surprised by how long it is -- the story is around 19,000 words. That makes it a novella, which is just insane to me. No WONDER it took so long to write! Of course, once I finished it I saw all kinds of other things I could do with it, but that will have to wait until later. For now, you'll be getting the drafty copy. Sorry about that. 

The idea is to have serials released to the general non-patron public three months after they finish up here. So "Gift Exchange" will be posted on SoFurry and other sites in April; "Stable Love" will be posted in May; and the yet-to-be-named March/April serial will be dropping in July. I'm planning to edit each of these stories within that time, so if you're interested in seeing the cleaned-up versions I'll be sure to drop a link to where they can be found on your furry art site of choice. 

Hopefully I'll be able to get caught up with the serials and the blog fairly soon; the Spring semester starts at the end of this month with a couple of abbreviated courses. I have "Argumentation and Debate" revving up with classes two times a week, and "Elementary Statistics" in March as an online class for eight weeks. I'm positive the workload for both of those will be pretty hectic, so it would definitely be a good idea to make sure I'm in good shape before then. 

For now, though, I've got to dig myself out of the slight scheduling hole I've made! Next week, I'll include a link to either a Dropbox folder or Google Doc that will have the entire rough draft of "Gift Exchange". For future serials, I'll include the link with each part so folks can catch up if they've missed a post or two.

As always, thank you folks SO MUCH for supporting me. I really, truly appreciate it and I hope you've enjoyed the first serial of 2017!