Looking ahead

As the screenplay wraps up this week, here’s some thoughts on what’s ahead.

First off, since last July, when Saida & Autumn started, I’ve managed…

• 39 posts in Saida & Autumn
• 15 posts in Red Savina
• 2 standalone holiday stories for Halloween and Christmas

Counting this post and the final Red Savina post, I’ll have made 86 posts total in 69 weeks!

Yay! But… the truth is I’m a little burned out, and need to hop off this schedule for a bit.

The options for the immediate future are:

• Keep things as they are (charging monthly) and try to manage at least a few thousand words a month that patrons get to see first, until such a time as another serial of some kind happens.
• Switch to a pay-per-post model, which means that you folks only get charged when I decide I have a post worth paying for. This might mean shuffling around the tiers a little, although I should do that anyway.
• Pause the Patreon for a month and… then do one of the other two options, I guess. This is what those in the writing business call “a delaying tactic.”

I’d been set on option two, pay-per-post, but I’m not positive it’s the right call. If I manage to post something worth paying for twice a month (gasp) it might charge you even more! The flip side of that is that if I don’t post anything in a month I’m willing to charge you for, you don’t get charged at all. Look at the money we’re all saving! (Patreon lets you set how many per-post charges you’re willing to pay per month. For the record, I usually set mine to a max of two posts per month, so if someone I’m supporting at $3 per post gets out two, they get $6, but if they get out twelve, they get… $6.)

I’ll probably run a poll about this next week for patrons—-at any level, even just $1—-to see what you all think. Please answer the poll if I do this, folks; it’ll be an important signal to me.

Also: this week ends Red Savina! I hope you’ve been enjoying it—-and I hope you like the ending, whether it’s happy or sad or ambiguous—-and I hope either way you’ll leave it a like and/or a comment. I’m pretty sure there’s a fair number of you I never hear from, and as trite as it may be, feedback means a lot to writers, even if the feedback is just “Yeah, I dug this.”

Either way, I have housekeeping and work ahead to do on both serials. I haven‘t forgotten the ebooks owed from Saida & Autumn, even though it looks like they‘ll end up being an early 2020 project at this point (sorry), and I have to figure out what to do with the screenplay once it‘s finished, too.

I’ll be back in chatty-cat mode with you all next week!