ANNOUNCEMENT! Some bittersweet changes ahead!

Hey folks,

I’ve been completely out of commission due to an illness, so this is a little later than I was hoping to put this out, but I’ve got some announcements to make about how this Patreon will operate going forward. I’m not shuttering the whole thing and quitting writing or anything, so don’t get too scared! But, there’s big changes afoot, and I’ll try to go over it succinctly. 

FIRST OFF, what’s changing?

This is the part that I think is a bummer. In short, the just past April poll and story are gonna be the last for the time being. No May story, no more polls. Postcards are also going out after this last batch. I’m simplifying my tiers to the bone and throwing out the milestone goals and all that. This will be effective starting June 1st, so if you’re not interesting in sticking around as I refocus on bigger, slower projects, you should jump ship before then.

The April story I owe y’all, I’m just gonna make it a public post, so don’t worry about sticking around for it. Just keep an eye on my Twitter for it’s release.

DETAILS?

Going forward, my main focus is switching over to full time work on my visual novel, Reckless Sympathy. I’ve talked about it a little, and I’ll be talking about it a lot more soon. It’s very sick, I promise.

There’s gonna be just one tier with benefits. If you want to drop any amount of money in for my as general support (higher or lower!), you’ve got my undying gratitude as always. It helps a lot!

But, $5 a month will get you access to at-least-once-a-month posts about Reckless Sympathy development, and you’ll be able to download chapters of it as it comes out with no additional charge. That extends to the full game once it’s all out, of course.

That’s it. Simple, elegant.

SO THEN, WHY?

Back in the day, I did a relaunch of this Patreon when I was really struggling at my job, hoping to double down on writing in my spare time so that I could maybe someday support myself off the Patreon itself. I got a lot of patrons! I’ve been consistently surprised by how many people have both signed up, and stuck around.

Once the pandemic started, I lost that job, and with the world being so grim, it got really difficult to do more than maintain my Patreon output monthly. It maybe doesn’t look like much, but it takes a lot of work for me!

I also kinda hit a ceiling of awareness as I backed away from releasing lots of Twitter stories. I never got more concurrent patrons than I did right at the time of that relaunch, and certainly didn’t make it to self-sufficiency. It was a little disheartening for a while.

Then, enter me taking a couple months off of Patreon earlier this year to focus on a bigger project.

Wow! I had so much fun! Writing was easy again!

It turns out that letting all my personal work fall by the wayside was bad for me. I started Doomgender to write what I want to write, how I want to write it, and I feel like I’ve backed myself into a corner a little. I’ve noticed myself relying even more on thin stock characters and situations in my fics, and I don’t feel as proud of the short fiction I’m putting out. I want more space to breath, more space to let my characters grow and be complicated!

I’m gonna miss doing the monthly poll. It was a fun game to play with y’all, and I really appreciate everyone who suggested ideas and got excited for the things I did with them. Seriously, thank you.

Also shoutouts to the special few people who got my postcards! It was a real longshot vanity project, but I hope you enjoyed getting them as much as I liked making them! 

Now, I’m not gonna stop writing romance between queer characters, and I’m not backing away from kink or smut, though not everything I do is going to be explicit in the way a lot of Doomgender stuff has been. I don’t intend to ‘clean up my image’, or anything like that. It’s a matter of my current interests, not (gagging noise) marketability.

Free Twitter stories are a distant memory at this point, but they won’t be coming back anytime soon. I won’t rule out stuff like the monthly poll or postcards returning someday, but I make no promises.

Anyway.

I’m probably a much less optimistic person than who I was when I did the writeup for the initial relaunch of this Patreon. I expect to lose most of y’all over the next few months. And that’s fine! We had a good run!

Those of you who stick around, I hope you come to enjoy the garbage pail of evil weirdo girls I’m preparing for for you. There is much to be done, but I’m glad to be making something that makes me this proud again.

IN CLOSING,

Thanks to those of you who stuck this long post out! If you’ve got questions or thoughts, please feel free to message me through Patreon or do a comment right here. That last Patreon story should be done soon, and then the Reckless Sympathy posting begins.

Goodnight, goodbye, and remember that in spite of the world, we can still get weirder.

~Benn {Doomgender} Ends