July Update
Added 2021-07-02 23:35:36 +0000 UTCAlright, time to talk about a few things. Most importantly of which is some plans I have for the future of this Patreon. But first let's start with the stuff I got done in the month of June.
Let This Eagle Soar
- A Fire Emblem: Three Houses fic featuring Edelgard and her boytoy Raphael.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/32121736
http://www.hentai-foundry.com/stories/user/PunishedVarmint/50672/Let-This-Eagle-Soar
The 500 Series
- June's collection of daily prompts assembled in one convenient chapter.
Alright, so obviously this wasn't a real productive month for me. Which I'm not happy about, and I have a real hard time nailing down why it happened exactly. It's easy to just say lack of motivation, but I wanted to get to the root cause. I suspect it might be due to my lack of physical activity. When the body gets slow and sluggish, the brain does as well. I need to work on getting myself more sunlight, moving my limbs around, get the blood pumping into more than just one organ. I live a sedentary life and it's easy to neglect those things if you're not careful. But the good news is that mentally I feel great, so I just need to get my body to the same point.
But enough about that. I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with this Patreon, and though I have a lot of ideas, none of them have really stuck out as something that would make people WANT to subscribe. I want to be able to offer a product here that you can't get anyway else. Something exclusive, or at least time limited so that patrons have first access. I know a lot of my fellow writers do that sort of thing, posting their stories for Patreon supporters first and then posting them publicly a few weeks later. And I think I may start doing that as well.
I'm yet undecided if I want to do this for every story that I write or if I want to create a new series that would only be available here. Anything that's commission by a client wouldn't be included -- Those would be immediately posted to AO3 and HF as soon as they're done (and after the client pays, of course). Exclusive content on Patreon would purely be stories that I've written of my own volition.
Anyways, I've still got time to think about it while I work on more commissions this month. I love writing smut, but it would also be nice to make a bit more money doing it. I don't think constantly opening and accepting commissions is the answer. Sometimes I enjoy them, but not as much as writing my own content. If I can get more patrons by offering priority access to those stories, that would really be nice. Can't pay the bills on comments alone, ya know?
But we'll see. I don't want to make any promises about pricing tiers right now since I have no idea if I'm even going to go through with such a plan. Maybe I'll get another idea later, but in the end I've got to seriously think about how to leverage this hobby into something that supports me financially. Then I can spend less time grinding at my job and more time writing. As of right now, I'm on a four-day workweek. Meaning I only have Sun, Sat, and Mon to write. All the other days where I work, I'm just too exhausted by the end to think about smut. And that's a real pity.
