Happy New Year's (Patreon)

I'm not one for making resolutions per se, but I am still kind of excited for the new year. This past year was incredibly rough, and I'm looking forward to having it behind me. I'll spare you all the gorey details, but one of the biggest issues I have had is that I horribly underestimate how long a project will take and keep stacking more and more shit on myself and just get more and more overwhelmed.

Anyway the main thing I wanted to mention here is that I know I have been pretty scarce this month. I haven't had a project finished in almost a month, but that will hopefully change soon. The biggest issue I have had lately is a complete and total lack of time and also horrible health. I work retail so november/december is nothing but all work all the time. Putting in 40 hours a week or more which leaves me with very little time. Add on to that the fact that it was the holidays and so all my days off were spent doing family things. There was thanksgiving, then a week after that was my birthday and then a few weeks after that was Christmas. Add on to all that my absolutely terrible immune system and it made for a bad time. I was running on low sleep for the past two months. There were days where I would even pull all nighters just so I could get something done, and I suspect that had a lot to do with it. (Not to mention, anyone who has worked retail during 4th quarter knows it is a hotbed of disease) Anyway I started december with the worst flu I have ever had. My throat was so torn up I full on lost my voice for a week. During the course of being so plugged up and nasty with the flu, I managed to get an ear infection which was constant pain and left me completely deaf for almost a week. I recovered from that just in time to get a cold. Which while the cold isn't anything serious, it did close my sinuses up for four days which in turn caused it to digivolve into a sinus infection which I still have. I've basically had a migraine for a week now, and let me tell you, it sucks.

Despite all this, I have been writing a bit this month. I started the month with one small personal project which kinda grew into something large and I didn't quite get to finish it. I'm ready for the final scene, but I realized that I was way behind schedule to get a fic done for Christmas so I sidelined it until I could finish my next project. I spent a few weeks working on a Gooed Friends chapter for Christmas, but as I was writing I realized how massive an undertaking it was shaping up to be, and it really wasn't much of a christmas story. It was just Gak being introduced to Jackson's family which could have happened during any long weekend of school break so I started yet another story. This one is going well and is near finishing, but I have had zero time to do anything since Christmas happened. I am headed out of town this weekend to see extended family so I had to adjust my work schedule. (Jan 1st is the first day you are allowed to request time off of work, I am having my family Christmas this weekend.) As such I had to frontload my work week this week in order to get friday/saturday off work. I haven't really had a day off since Christmas, and Christmas itself hardly counted as a day off since it was booked solid with family stuff. I'm not complaining, mind you. It was a wonderful day, but it didn't really give me any free time to work on writing.

Another problem I have been having lately is with my computer. I can't keep it running... or rather, I can keep it running, but I have a helluva time getting it to turn on. Once it fires up, it stays running, but getting it to actually boot is a chore.

For those tech savvy folk out there, maybe you can suggest something. I have tried changing parts and fixing this and rewiring that, but no luck so far. It will get to the Hard Drive screen, and then it will just kind of shit itself. Like I get the big Gigabyte screen, and the little loading wheel and it starts to load Windows, and then it's like a 50/50 chance it will just shit itself right then and there. Everything will just go black. It's also worth mentioning that it likes to post the imagine from one graphics card or the other. Like, I have a big graphics card which is supposed to be the main graphics, but half the time, when the PC boots it displays the images through the on board graphics built into the cpu. An interesting thing to note is, if shows the images through the cpu graphics and I manage to get the PC booted into windows, the thing is missing a lot of its drivers when windows finally starts. Like, I can access my radeon card. The computer recognizes it is there, but it acts like I have not installed the drivers. If I try to install the drivers I get some fatal errors. Sometimes I get the PC to boot and it will display stuff on the radeon card, but it won't have the drivers installed for that either. Like, everything will be horribly low resolution, I won't have access to many of my peripheries. It won't recognize my external HD etc. Anyways I have spent most if not all my free time this past week just trying to repair my computer so it will load properly, but so far I have had no luck.

Anyway, today is the first day that I have any semblance of free time, but even that isn't much. I've got a few hours to myself in which I will need to pack my bags and get ready for my flight, and hopefully transfer files to my surface and my phone before I head out to do New Year's Eve with friends. I can already tell you I am pulling yet another all nighter tonight because I have a 5 am flight out of here. So basically I am gonna come home from hanging with my friends, shower, grab my bags, turn around and head for the airport and then spend the rest of the day either in a car or on a plane. I should be across the country and with my extended family sometime friday night at which point I will stagger over to the guest room and pass out until Saturday. I'll spend saturday with the family, and then probably do church with them sunday morning and turn around and catch a flight back home Sunday afternoon. I'll sleep through most of monday, and then have to go back to work on tuesday. ._.

I'm taking my tablet with me, and I will load my writing files onto it. I don't expect to get much writing done, due in no small part to the fatigue and family, but if I get any time to myself I will poke at the writing. The main problem I face here is that my tablet doesn't play nice with dropbox (windows basically blocked dropbox functionality on the first model Surface to force users to use the windows equivalent.) So I will be able to work on the files, but I won't be able to update the dropbox version until I get home.

So basically what I am saying is that I will finally freakin have time to work next week. After this next week my hours at my day job are going to be slashed into the ground, and it can't happen soon enough. I can't wait for the day that I can ditch that job forever and focus full time on writing. I should have 2 fics up in the near future. I've got that one personal project I mentioned, and I have the patreon fic for December (which will be Christmas themed) then I will work on the January Patreon fic, and spend whatever time I have after that getting caught up on commission work.

Once I finish my current commission backlog, I won't be opening commissions up for a long while. I want to spend more time working on ebooks and building my library. I've been talking it over and judging the feedback from the two I did before, and it looks like going forward I am going to add a lot more new content to the ebooks such as additional short stories or chapters. These stories will be posted publicly eventually, but It'll be after I hit certain goals in sales. The main reasons I am doing this are

a) to give something more to those who buy

b) I need to hit a certain amount sold on amazon and nook in order for my story to even show up in searches and recommendations lists

c) I'd love it if I could actually at least break even on how it cost to actually produce the book (not even factoring in how much work I put into it. Just speaking on a purely monetary amount)

Gonna try doing one of those a month. I'm playing it by ear as I go, and we'll see how that works.

... I got really off topic, didn't I? Well this year was hell both for health issues (physical and mental) and just from my day job steadily getting worse and worse, but I am relatively hopeful for next year. I think I am in a good position to start shifting towards writing as a full time job, and once I get to a point where writing is sustainable I can finally get back to work on those sci-fi fantasy novels I keep saying I'll finish. Actually, one way or the other I will budget more time towards putting work into those this year. Maybe I'll make that my new year's resolution.

As mentioned I have been getting some stories done, and since I doubt I will have any time to myself to work on them, I wanted to share my progress so far with anyone who wants to check them out. 

Patreon Monthly Christmas special WIP:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nuudqcdqhlj0ok9/Dicklaus.docx?dl=0

Gooed friends 4 WIP:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cf526ts99pm7z2b/Gak4.docx?dl=0

OmniGro 2 (personal project mentioned earlier) WIP

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jhbusvyvr9yuxfe/OmniGro2.doc?dl=0

Now just a P.S. to my Patreon followers, I am going to change the format I work with on here. I'm gonna be going back to my old style of doing the updates here via .doc/.pdf uploads. I did it a bit at first, and then there was a brief scare where Patreon was acting like they might start axing adult content so I started hosting all that stuff off-site. The ToS have changed considerably and I now feel comfortable posting that stuff here. So I'll add special versions of the .docs here for you guys to read available for all Patreons. Nothing too fancy, but a nice way to read it on the go if interested. 

Also as mentioned I am gonna put more emphasis on ebooks, and since there will be some content on those that won't be released publicly, I will make that content available here before it ever sees publication elsewhere, so there's something to look forward to. 

With that, I'll be back in town in like 4 days, and hopefully I will have stuff to post then. If not I will have a slew of updates in the next week.