Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes - Part 2:The Polls

To be completely honest, the polls have been a bit of a headache since the beginning, and that’s entirely my own fault.

When I set this whole thing up, I just had started regularly posting Wake-up Call and All Right! Fine! I’ll Take You! on a weekly basis. It was something new to me, as I had always worked on assignments on which I just wrote till the damn thing was done, so forcing myself to keep to a weekly deadline was not only new, but a bit of a journey of self-discovery. I saw how satisfying it was to get immediate feedback on my work, how the opinions and discussions helped me keep going, and even got me some more than valuable insight into what was working and the things in my writing that I wasn’t aware I was putting in. It was (is) wonderful.

So I thought I could push myself more.

The idea, then, was to get to three weekly stories regularly updating, along with the sporadic one-shot. So I set up two polls, which would decide two of the weekly spots, with me deciding what I would update on the third one.

… You can see how feasible thatcurrently is.

What I had naively assumed would happen was that people would use the commissioner tiers to get me to update some of my ongoing stories, as they would presumably subscribe because they liked said stories. That I would just have to get some extra updates to my Batman or Avatar fics, or something like that, as I kept working on the main stories.

You can see how that turned out.

The thing is, for some weird reason I’m still processing, plenty of people like my writing enough that they not only read what I come up with, but want me to write stories they have an idea for. It’s bewildering, really. And something I’m eternally grateful for—and that I’ll talk more about in the next post about how things may change in the future.

What matters for this one post is that I’m currently writing an astonishing amount of ongoing stories, with a couple more being worked on and not published yet, and that brings me to what I did with the polls.

Because I felt immensely guilty about the possibility of not updating my Oregairu fic after so many people became enthusiastic with it, and yet I knew with absolute certainty that if I did with the polls what I initially planned, that’s what would happen, with Wake-up call winning two weekly spots and the rest of my time being devoted to commissions that wouldn’t let me work on a third weekly story, I just decided to offer 4k extra words to any ongoing story to the winner of a poll.

That… Was a mistake.

I’m still trying to get a regular, consistent output, but 4k is basically a whole working day for me, unless it’s one of those days where I miraculously manage to get far more done than usual (but those are usually either followed or preceded by days where I write far less than 4k). So I should change that to, maybe, 3k words extra to the winning story.

That’s more or less reasonable, but I also want another change that’s more selfish than practical.

Because… Well, I started this whole thing to get to work on things I wanted to write. Don’t get me wrong, my previous experience helped me learn a lot about writing, but I just wanted to do my own thing.

And so I would like to change the polls in the following way:

The poll for €5 and above will get to decide which ongoing story gets 3k extra words added to it (or a single update, if the winning story isn’t a commission).

The poll for €2 and above? That will decide which of the things I feel like working on at the time (that aren’t commissions—because I like all of them, but I’ll work on them sooner or later anyway) will get an update. That should hopefully mean that I’ll get to write some of the plot bunnies for one-shots, omakes, and possible successors to the ongoing stories that have been rabidly nagging at me since months ago.

The thing is, I feel guilty about writing anything other than what I’ve promised you guys I would write. I know you’re here to support me, but I’m weird like that, and I’ve got this particular hang-up where, if I feel an obligation to do something, that doesn’t let me do any other thing until I’ve dealt with the main issue. Which doesn’t mean I do it sooner, just that I don’t do the thing I felt like doing.

So, I’d like to compromise: I tell you a few things I would like to write, and you all tell me: “Agrippa, do thisthing. We demand it. Don’t even think about wasting time pondering whether you should or not.”

Yes, I’m basically asking you to roleplay. Not in the kinky way, though.

So, with that being said… what do you all think?