Patreon Update 4-1-26 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, thanks for sticking around for another book on Patreon!

I'm now scrapping the rotation, putting DD, RD and EG on hiatus to go after my newest passion... GOATS! 'Goat to Catch Them All!' is a true goat harem crime story and my latest burning passion!Goat to Catch Them All is a bleating heart romance at it's core. Billy, a Baaa-chelor and employee at Goat-arade, must climb the sheer cliffs of his rugged life to win over Cashmere, the sophisticated beauty. She's worth every penny and knows it. Their wild tale will be un-fur-gettable as they butt heads and share straw in a whirlwind romance you just have to read to believe!

We aren't kidding around. This story's goat it all! Kid-napping, goats, horny fun, goats, an unbleatable cast, goats and so much more... goats!

Oh look at the date! It's April First. And I had an update land on this date, not at all planned, but I couldn't resist. Anywho, let's continue.

Art by - Insiddious and special thanks to Chaos. The two of them were happy to make some AI art for this joke. As a bonus, I now have a discord channel full of sexy goat women.

I did have art scheduled, however, despite scheduling it at the very beginning of the book, actually before I even started Returners Defiance, I do not yet have the art in hand. It's a three-character piece, because I know you guys have been asking for those larger pieces, and they will come soon.

Returners Defiance was fast, technically speaking. This is the fastest Returner's Defiance book I have ever written. Patreon, with the release frequency, was about 30% more words a week than even something with larger chapters like Ard's Oath. So it was a push, but it was a push I needed.

I did not lose any time, but I was behind starting Returners, so we're still behind. I am hopeful that I will be able to get out Dungeon Diving without having to do any delays to the overall schedule. The plan will be for me to take time off in June. I'm taking two weeks to visit some family and would like not to have to hole up to write/edit. I will work on Escaping Gravity before I leave. When I do leave, I'm probably not going to work at all. If I have any saved up chapters I'll leave those running for you. If there's more than a couple of days where you guys don't have chapters, I will comp a month for everyone currently subscribed when that happens. I don't like to leave you guys hanging.

Also good news, Yanni is back and working on the Kickstarter art, so we can get that moving. The plan is April 20th. And Chris is probably about to leap in here and shout "it's the plan, and there may be delays", that's to protect his inbox, as both of ours can get a little busy if I say something without caveats and it doesn't entirely happen as I hoped.

A few fun details from Returners Defiance: I at no point intended for there to be a Shadow Monarch à la Solo Leveling. It has been the plan for some time to make Merlin into the Shadow King, but then Simone's gender-neutralizing of the title happened completely separate of any thought about Merlin's title. So I got to this book and realized I had a Shadow Monarch, and decided to make a little bit of a joke with it.

Also fun fact, I miscounted my word count. I double-counted some words that got misplaced in the shuffling of documents on my end, and so I was actually very close to ending the book on the note of reviving the Monkey King because I love cliff hangers.

But then I pushed ahead because when I was getting ready to do some final edits and compiled everything together, I realized I was well off my normal word count. So I had to add the following sequence with the Monkey King, which I think worked out well and gave Merlin some more traction in this book. Thank God I'm a discovery writer, when I realize something is due to the editor and I need more words, I can just sit down and they come out rather easily, blending them into the book such that no one would ever notice that it wasn’t planned that way the whole time.

Other things are proceeding along. If I'm not talking about it, there's probably not a firm date, and that's why.

Webcomics are all moving forward. The distributor I work with upped their requirements for launch very recently, so it's probably going to push me a little further back. I thought I would be ready in April and now I probably won't be ready until June or July, and I still have to get scheduling approved once I'm fully ready. That said, it's moving along. At this point we have around 12 finished chapters of Dungeon Diving and Returners Defiance, but we're just making more so that when we launch we can run a 40 to 50 episode season without having to go on hiatus before the end of the first season. So we're just stocking up chapters, the teams are mostly on auto-pilot with me reviewing the various stages weekly.

I'm firming up in my mind that most likely when the next series ends I will not replace anything in the rotation, and I will wind down the rotation to a single series. I'll at least try, I can always go back to a rotation, but I'm going to try to write one series straight through and wind down the rotation to do that so I don’t have to put anything on hiatus. That is probably a long ways out if we're honest, but some of these things I do have to plan years in advance to make them work.

We'll go back to Dungeon Diving coming up next. I've already started and I've got the first handful of chapters. I have been pushing pretty hard on Returners and I know I may have reset some expectations with the five-chapter launch. Patreon is an incredible motivator for me because I put a lot of pressure on myself to deliver a chapter a day, or whatever schedule I set. It helps me with my editing and puts a hard deadline that triggers some of the more positive aspects of my ADHD.

Otherwise things are going great. Feel free to drop some questions down below.

Yanni is back and starting work, but we're focused on Kickstarter stuff first so you still won't see his art for a little while. I should have a nice flow of content coming from the other artists though. I'm now working with three additional artists. Alditha, whose style is very similar to Yanni's and who did the Saving Super Villains covers, you'll see maybe a piece every couple of months. I also have Jack and Howexen that I'll be using for art, I’m hoping 1-2 pieces from each book.

If you've got art requests, please throw those down below, at a certain point it is actually difficult for me to produce this many briefs, and turning my brain off and just doing what you guys want is the easiest thing, and also gives you exactly what you want.

Anyway, thank you everyone and have a great day. Thank you again for being here on my Patreon.