New Monthly Polls Incoming!

For the longest times, I didn’t know how to implement rewards in a way that wouldn’t compromise my work in a different way. I’m already doing my best to write stories, so I can’t realistically add an extra on top to tempt patrons with. Not unless I purposefully slow down everything else, which leaves a bad aftertaste. Even the usual ‘advance chapters’ thing didn’t really work for me for various reasons:

First, I don’t trust myself to keep my own schedule if I overcomplicate it. You don’t see it from your side, but I’m really bad with that side of things.

Second, it doesn’t feel right to offer advanced chapters when I often rely on the invaluable help of this community to catch embarrassing grammar and spelling mistakes that would get into the Patreon version if I were to release it earlier.

Third… I swear there was a third, but it seems to have escaped my mind while I was busy with the other two.

There’s also the fact that I’ve been expecting to be laid off from my job at any time for the last year and change and was counting on unemployment to have the time to muse over this problem properly. The threat of unemployment is still looming over me, but apparently I can’t even get this one positive thing from it.

So… yeah. Right now, my Patreon page is just a tip jar. Or a begging cap. Which isn’t exactly… a bad thing, I guess? But I always felt guilty I didn’t do anything else with it.

Well… I have finally found something that’s both viable and I find comfortable with doing and that’s giving you more of a say on what I write. Currently I’m semi-compromised to update at least twice a week, once with Oracle and once with Ashikabi of the Center. With everything else I write being either commissions or just nice extras.

The Patrons already had a say in this, but only as a single poll at the end of a serialization to decide the next work I would take up. Considering the scope of my stories goes from months to years, it wasn’t all that much, in the end.

So I’m going to rework the system. Instead of a single vote per story, there’ll be now a vote per tier level each month, which will replace the slots of my least popular current work -Ashikabi of the Center- each tier gives access to all the lower-tier votes and each poll will be customized.

This means that a Tier 3 patron will be able to vote in three different polls and that each poll will include more options than the previous, rated by how convenient they are for me to write. Tier 1 polls will only include a few stories I’m confident I can write a chapter without trouble and higher ones will progressively include more and more options that will take more work on my part to be written.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be abandoning Ashikabi of the Center, by the way. Nor that it’ll be solely reliant on votes to continue. I will still work on it, though it’ll be a lower priority than the semi-reserved story slots. Also, since there’s currently no Tier 5 Patrons, that means their slot will default back to Ashikabi of the Center too.

I think that’s all. Questions, suggestions and criticism will be, of course, welcome. This same message will be included in my next updates of my main stories, so it achieves maximum diffusion.