October Progress, and Jaguar News

Welcome to November, everyone! We’re almost two weeks into November, actually, and I’d say “I don’t know where the time went” but I actually do. It went into book launch stuff. So without further ado, let’s catch up with Jaguar activities from October!

Writing

The elephant in the room for the past few months has absolutely been Major Pieces, because I anticipated that collection being the size of Alysha’s Fall (another collection of related short stories), and in fact, it ended up larger than From Ruins (to the tune of 600+ pages). I spent most of October tackling the last and longest of the stories from that volume, “Moving Out”, at 40K, and “Deserving”, at 39K. This project consumed nearly three and a half months! But it shows… it’s enormous. Seriously, look at the spine.

I’m proud of it, and it’s nearly all wrapped up; I’m just waiting for the metadata to propagate everywhere to send out official launch posts. You’ll probably see the Patreon launch post next week. (I will be saying this more than once, but if you’ve read it and want to help out, you can star it on goodreads, or review it wherever you bought it, or on Amazon for maximum exposure).

In addition to the fiction, though, I’ve been asked to do four teaching/speaking engagements in the next year. Three of them are paid engagements, and the fourth is a pay-it-forward situation at my high school alma mater, so I am twice excited: once because I love teaching/speaking, and twice because people aren’t expecting me to do it ‘for exposure.’ This is something I’ve been thinking about, particularly in reference to conventions… cons will invite you to be a guest and then expect you to entertain and educate the con-goers for free. In twenty-plus years of attending cons, I’ve been compensated all of three times for my work as a guest, which strikes me as ludicrous. If I’m speaking on a panel, I am working. I recognize that most cons don’t budget to pay the dozens of minor guests they invite to fill out their schedules, but if it matters that those minor guests show up and do something, then they should be paid. I think, anyway. I might do a con once in a while as a gift, but I feel it should be my choice to say ‘keep the money, y’all’, rather than a situation where I’m expected to be dazzling, funny, and informative for several hours for free.

But anyway. Four engagements of that kind mean a lot of prep, some of which I hope to expose to you so you can watch my development process. My first one is in January, but once the wagon train gets going it’s January-February stretching into April, April, and September, so I want as many ducks in a row as I can get!

Finally, I feel I should make it known that all three of the Jokka audiobooks are now available via bandcamp. If you were listening to Shell and wanted the other two (or if you were waiting for all of them to be available to get started on them), go grab them! 

Art

It’s funny that I think that I’m doing ‘less art’ when I’m consistently filling sketchbooks. In October, for instance, I used up 56 pages of my latest sketchbook, and a lot of those pages have multiple sketches on them. I am drawing, it’s just invisible work—to me. I think part of that might be that I no longer upload them to a large central website, the way I did when Stardancer.Org was active; absent the work of putting the thing on a scanner bed, scanning it, tagging it, uploading and describing it, it just sort of floats out of my head. The other part, of course, is that my brain thinks only “finished” pieces count, which is kind of ridiculous. Sketching is the hardest part of the art process for me! Once a sketch has made it to the final drawing stage, the painting part is relaxing.

Those of you who wonder where you can see most of that art, it either ends up on Discord or in the backs of books. While I sometimes regret letting Stardancer go, maintaining it was a lot of work for me and Engineer Sam.

Anyway, notable among the sketches in October was a piece that will end up finished, the cover for Heartskein, which as you can see involves babies. I also designed and finished a new piece of marketing art, the logo that will go on all the books that were commissioned by readers… so three books so far, Major Pieces, Heartskein, and the forthcoming first book of Coracle which was quietly arranged for by a reader on Patreon. Please pause a moment and consider how amazing it is that there are books that have been financially underwritten by you, and that would not exist without your support. A lot of readers say ‘we’d like this book please’. Not a lot of readers get together to say ‘and we’re going to buy that time so you can write it.’ (I guess, to be fair to me, not a lot of authors are willing or able to reply ‘let’s work together and do this thing,’ either, so… go all of us!)

All in all, I am surprisingly pleased with the fact that I’m still drawing despite all the writing I’m concentrating on.

Other Stuff

In the ‘miscellaneous’ category, I will say that sales on Etsy and Zazzle are slow but still happen, which is fine. (Though after re-organizing my closet of mailing supplies I am excited about mailing things and have nothing to mail. At least with the holidays approaching I’ll be able to ship Christmas cards!) Keep in mind that Zazzle has billions of coupons pretty much all the time so don’t pay full price there, please!

In addition, I’ve gotten serious about scanning all the loose papers and files in my closet so that I can box them and put them in the attic (in plastic containment, otherwise I might as well not bother in Florida with the heat + humidity). I don’t know what to think of half of what I’m finding. (Did my parents really need to keep every scorecard from the standardized tests I had to sit through all my life?) I’m not really into nostalgia, so I find most of this stuff burdensome. My spouse, though, insists that it should be retained in case I become some kind of Important Name, since almost all of it is doodled on or whatever. Also, the antecedents to the modern Peltedverse are all over a lot of these ancient papers, and it’s both bemusing and appalling to find these roots and realize… ‘oh no, now I have to figure out what to do with them.’ Are they still canonical? Can they be farmed for canonical material? Should I have them downstairs in a binder so I can access them, or do they go back up in the attic with the stuff I never want to see again? Oof.

Nevertheless, this is something that has to be done so I can at least get it out of sight. Hopefully that will clear up some of the mental clutter as well. The Ai-Naidar would suggest so, anyway. I will continue sharing with you some of the funny or cute or interesting bits I find on Wednesdays!

Patreon

Finally, I’d like to talk about Patreon! A lot about Patreon, actually. First, we had fifteen posts in October, which doesn’t seem a lot to me until I realize that’s an average of one every two days. I hope you’re all enjoying the content; as far as I know, most of you are consuming via email so I don’t see any engagement information (likes/comments/etc). That makes it hard for me to tell how many of you are happy, but I haven’t had significant numbers of people quitting so I’m guessing it’s all good. Thank you, again, for supporting me! Literally! Patreon is sitting at 23% of my revenue for the year, so you matter, and never question that.

I’d also like to add, in terms of news, that Discord is wrapping up the Alysha Forrest readalong; our next readalong is Her Instruments (reading for the first time or re-reading), which should put the read of A Rose Point Holiday right smack at the end of the year during the holidays. Festive and appropriate! I am looking forward to it, so please join us anytime in the #vault channel if you want to participate!

Which brings me to a couple of things I want to discuss about the Patreon. The first is the grant fund, because we’ve finally gotten to the bottom of that barrel… but I want to share with you the (anonymized, naturally) statistics about its usage. The fund has disbursed 23 grants for a total of just about $800.

So, to be clear: that’s $800 that you all donated so that your fellow readers could participate in the Patreon. I had nothing to do with that money, other than to say I thought the idea was awesome.

Now, since I don’t run the grant fund, I feel like it would be inappropriate for me to say ‘let’s keep doing this, please donate to the fund.’ This is really your decision, whether you want to continue contributing and how you want the fund to be managed. Obviously I think it’s fantastic, both from a community perspective and because that’s $800 I wouldn’t have otherwise had. But it’s your risk and your money, and so it should be up to you whether we refill the fund and keep going. But before we make that decision we’ve got another thing to discuss.

Heavy stuff ahead, get your warm drinks, or cool if you're inclined.

As much as possible, I’ve tried to make my spaces communal, and to encourage the bonds between you as readers. In the past, on Livejournal, that meant my content was public and its availability was an on/off switch: no one had special access, it was ‘everyone has access, or no one at all.’ In that model, people who were flush would pay extra in order to make the content available for everyone, whether they could afford it or not, and that meant everyone was on the same page. If someone wanted to discuss a post, everyone could read it and join the discussion. 

My Patreon isn’t set up that way, currently… it’s “you get what you, in particular, pay for.” Which means some of you are reading/seeing things that other people aren’t.

I recognize that this is the way most businesses work. I know why, too, because I make money consistently from Patreon, and my gut instinct is that if I try to shift back to a ‘all the content is available to everyone, and the people with lots of money are underwriting it for the people who don’t currently have any’ model, I will lose a lot of revenue. But I’m not just a businessperson, and my art isn’t solely intended as a way to make money, and I'm not happy with the way I’ve created stratifications in my readers based on individual financial situations. Society is unfair enough—do I really need to create haves and have-nots among my readers too?

To some extent, the grant fund helps with this, but it requires people to be all right with asking for help, and you and I and everyone knows that asking for help is really hard. We wouldn’t need a grant fund at all if the material was available to everyone. 

So, a more communal model of Patreon would be that everything I post would be available to all patrons, but what I’d make available would be based on the monthly total donated. In that model, there would only be three tiers: the dollar that gets you entrance at all (because I’m not going to post free content—I need the people who are here to have thought about the decision to be here); the five dollars that gets you access to Discord (similarly, I want people to be mindful about whether they want to participate in the chat, because that makes them more likely to treat that space with respect); and a “you are unlocking content for the community” tier that would be $10 or more. I’d have that last tier so I can keep track of my community-builders… I’d want to honor them separately, and be able to discuss with them how I'm using their money.

My guess is that moving to this model will cost me. (I think.) My time, my talent, and my effort are worth money, and I need to eat, so I need people to pay me… but to the extent that I’m capable, I’d like to foster a sense that y'all are in this boat, with me, all together, and that we’ve got one another’s backs. There are too many places that isn’t true already.

So, as the wrap-up to this October overview, I’d like to ask you… what do you think about that? Your ideas, suggestions, comments, and questions are always welcome, and on this topic, in particular.