Burning out (Patreon)

TL;DR:

• I'm taking next week off due to exhaustion.
• I'm taking all of December off. There will be no new content in December.
• Payments will be paused during December, meaning that existing patrons will retain access to all content but existing patrons will NOT be charged for the month of December.
• I know I did this after teasing the next chapter quite cruelly. Sorry about that.

The extremely long version:

The accumulation of stress and exhaustion has reached a point where if I don't take a mental health break, the thing that breaks will be me. It wasn't that long ago that I took a break after completing the book 7 chapters, and I went into that already heavily stressed an exhausted. Unfortunately, a number of events conspired to prevent me from getting the downtime I needed during that break and I came out of it more stressed than I went in.

At that point, I was just looking to take some time off at New years. Subsequent events, however, have exacerbated my problems. I now fins myself in a feedback loop where exhaustion makes everything take longer, which means I don't get enough rest and wind up more exhausted.

I won't go into detail on everything that has come up, but but my mother was hospitalised last week, where she joined my brother who was already there after being in a major accident. Both are now home, but events have not had a positive impact on my time management or stress levels, as you might imagine.

I'm taking a week off for rest, which is not a decision I make lightly. I'm frequently asked for advice on becoming a successful serialised author and the #1 piece of advice is always the same: set a schedule and keep it. So, to break that schedule on short notice is not something I want to do but, at this point, it's something I need to do.

After more than two years of writing this story, a lot has changed for me. The schedule I set when I was starting out was designed to get as many chapters out as I could without burning out. The schedule I set back then did not take into account the various non-writing aspects I never realised would occupy so much of my time. As the story has found success - thank you for that, by the way - the non-writing aspects of being an author have only grown.

This is not me saying I'm going to change the standard release schedule, because it will continue at five days a week. But in order to maintain that, I need to reorganise how I work, in a major way. I need a proper rest and time to rebuild my time management from the ground up, which means hitting a big reset button. That reset button will be taking December off entirely. No weekly chapters, like I've done in the past.

As December won't have any content, I've decided to pause payments for that month. This means that any existing patrons will retain full content access at their tier level but will NOT be charged for the month of December. New patrons will be charged during this time for access to existing content.

The goal of these interruptions is to set myself up so that my increasingly untenable workload becomes once again sustainable. I've already started taking steps on this front and will continue to do so throughout the year. My intention is to start 2022 fresh, rested and ready to move forward with the story, stronger than ever.

I know what all this comes down to is that you will all be getting less chapters than you would like during the rest of this year. I hate making this choice, but it has to be made in order to fix what has become an increasingly impactful problem.

At this stage, I'm really looking forward to next year, being fully rested and launching myself fresh into the story. As for the road bumps along the way, I can only say I'm sorry.

-Shirt (Travis)