Merry Festivities™ and welcome to December! (Patreon)

November in Review

Hey everyone! This month I set up a word tracker so that I could make sure I kept my promise of having two writing days per week. Looks like I did manage it, but didn't quite hit my chapter/wordcount goal from it. Ah well — maybe to be expected though since I'm still having health issues.

Here's my wordcounts for the last month as a CSV, and here's a prettier display for it:

And before you ask — no, I have no idea why all the dates in the image are one day different than the dates in the exported CSV. It's bugged 😛 I'll fix it at some point

Also the reason I'm including those two days in October is those two days were the days I was working on Basket Case, which I didn't report with last month's words.

So yeah, this month you got:

• A Lot of Eggs and One Basket Case — 4 chapters
• Bad Blood — 1 chapter
• Shambles — 1 chapter
• The Once-Prince and the Wildling — 1 chapter

I also worked on a couple chapters that are yet to be finished — a bit of Shambles ch3, about half a chapter of Basket Case ch5, a bit of OP&W ch5. On top of that, I also finished a chapter of a project yet to be revealed — whether I share that one depends on how it goes and whether I feel comfortable sharing it, as the story is quite personal. We'll see. Oh, and I also started work on extracting Snowbound from the Troubleverse!

As you can see, I had a pretty busy month, buzzing from project to project. I actually quite liked doing that — previously I'd wait till I was excited for a project or had inspiration or whatever, but that led to long periods where I just couldn't write anything at all. But, yeah, now I've taken a lot of stories all off of hiatus and I'm basically telling myself to make time to work on any of them. That leads me to kinda just work on whichever sounds the most interesting at any given time, which ends up getting me to write a lot of stuff I wouldn't otherwise. And I've written a lot that I'm proud of as a result 😁

Plan Going Forwards

I have two chapter requests from Mercyque. This is going to be my first priority this month. Next up will be just continuing any of the stuff I'm already working on. Not currently thinking of starting other stories right now, although I did have some ideas the other day 👀

One thing I think I have decided is that my Patreon goals and tiers were kinda underselling myself, and I think starting January first I'm going to be raising everything a bit. If I compare the income I can get from programming and the income I'm currently getting for writing, it just seems really counterproductive to be spending this much time on this for under minimum wage. In other words, I think I've made the classic commission pricing mistake 😅

My plan is to continue doing two writing days per week for the foreseeable future, because y'all funded that goal and I'd like to do my best to uphold that promise. I am going to adjust the 2-days-a-week promise goal, though. I'm probably going to triple it. Assuming I spend 8 hours a day, 2 days a week, with on average 4 weeks in a month, that's 64 hours. At $300/mo (triple what the goal used to be) that's still less than $5 an hour. I think that's slightly more reasonable, though. I hope you agree?

So yeah, the changes I'm thinking are as follows:

• Guaranteed two novel days every week — $100 -> $300 (Around $4.69/hr)
• Guaranteed three novel days every week — $300 -> $500 (Around $5.21/hr — this is higher bcuz you're monopolising my time)
• Guaranteed four novel days every week — $1,000 (no change, around $7.81/hr)
• Tier Seven Vi Immortal (one chapter request) — $75 -> $200 (Forcing chapters of a specific story is harder and averages higher hours, and requires a lot of hours of planning outside of the writing. The higher cost is based on that. I'm going to tentatively say this is around $10/hr)
• Tier Eight Vi Immortal (two chapter requests) — $150 -> $500 (Again, you're monopolising my time. My time in a month is limited, so the price should reflect that. If you want additional chapters for cheaper, wait longer.)
• Immortal Eminence (three chapter requests) — $250 -> $1000 

What do you think of all this? Do you think this is fair? I'm happy to take feedback. I can maybe delay this a couple months if anybody is feeling really bad about it. Otherwise, yeah, these changes will go into effect starting with January first's payment. It shouldn't change how much you're pledging for me to be adjusting these tiers, but if you're pledging very high amounts it will affect what you get.

December Voting

Really want a chapter of a specific story? Let me know by voting for it!

Number of votes for each Patron tier:

• Tier Zero ($1) 1
• Tier One ($2) 2
• Tier Two ($5) 3
• Tier Three ($10) 5
• Tier Four ($20) 10
• Tier Five+ ($30+) 15

To explain again for anyone new to this: If you have 3 votes, you could assign two to one story and one to another, or put all three in one story, or spread them between a bunch of stories, etc. You can send me your votes in any way — In the comments on this post, in a PM, through Discord, etc.

I'll do my best to meet your desires! ✨

Obligatory Thank You™

This thank you was brought to you by my happiness at all of you continuing to support me, and I wanted to be Silly™ and Lighthearted™ so here we are with a thank you like this instead of the usual mushy stuff about how much I appreciate you and love you all.

Wow.

...In all seriousness, I hope y'all have been happy with the content I've been able to put out. I've been trying my best to live up to your support. Lemme know how I'm doing 🤍

See y'all next month! Stay safe and happy holidays!