I’ve had my Patreon for a month—time to break down how that’s going! (Spoiler alert: it’s going pretty well!)
writing
I published two stories on Patreon this month:
An Embarrassment of Riches — 4,100 words // tags: mind control, nsfw
Jen has been been hypnotized to get turned on when she’s embarrassed. All she has to do is get through the grocery store with no awkward incidents. That’s totally doable, right?
Mutual Satisfaction — 7,600 words // tags: nsfw, transgender
Inscribed by magic and bound by suspicion, a warlock and demon struggle to come to an understanding.
I’m really proud of this level of output! It means that since late February, I’ve written 11,700 words across two stories. In that time, I wrote four to five days a week, and averaged over 500 words a day. (By way of comparison, I wrote a total of 51,000 words across 11 stories in 2018.)
I know that many of my writing friends on Twitter are able to write two or even three times that in a month, but it’s a very good, consistent output for me, one that works with my Real Life obligations. Put another way: writing more than ~12,000 words a month would require Serious Structural Changes in my life and work situation, something I’m not currently in a position to do.
My gamble appears to have paid off: having a Patreon has helped me focus my creativity. I have very self consciously avoided trying to feel like I have a minimum output obligation to my patrons, because I don’t want to start down a path of guilt and recriminations. With that said, feeling like I am writing for a tight knit group of people has definitely given me the focus I needed to keep coming back to my stories, night after night, and craft them into something better.
With that said, I have published precisely zero stories publicly on my website. The issue is that I want to wait to release my stories publicly until the artwork I have commissioned for them are is done. The social media splash is bigger—Twitter links that have eye-catching artwork in their thumbnails do better than those that don’t—and both the artist and I can draw attention to the combined work simultaneously.
The downside of this approach is that while I have complete control over my Patreon release schedule, the public release schedule on my website depends on things outside my control. Assuming that some of my commissioned pieces are finished in the first or second week of April, that’ll be almost ten weeks since I last posted a new story on this website. I’m a little concerned about that, and I may have to change this policy going forward—for instance, writing shorter stories that I have no intent to commission art for, or simply accepting that I will need to go back and add art later.
Artwork
As a special treat, I want to share some artwork from an upcoming story involving a couple being corrupted into sexy plantgirls. Jill, my BFF partner-in-crime, will be illustrating the story with a four-panel sequence, and as a proof-of-concept, she passed along the following character sketches:
I’m excited to see the final product, and I’m extremely appreciative of my patrons, whose support is making commissioning sequences like this possible.
As for those of you that aren’t supporting me on Patreon, I apologize for the dearth of content. Stories are in the pipeline, and I’ll continue to iterate on my publishing schedule as necessary.