Three-Month Hiatus and the Future of the Blog (Patreon)

August 14th marks six years of the Molten Sulfur Blog. In all that time, I’ve never missed a weekly update. But I need to think about what the future holds. This blog is not going away – I love doing it, and I’m not going to stop. But it is going on hiatus for three months while I take my first break in six years. After that, the blog will update every other Tuesday instead of weekly.

Six years is a long time. That’s as long as I spent in undergrad and grad school combined. That’s as long as I spent in the Navy. In those six years, I left the Service, got married, got another degree, moved states twice, worked four different day jobs, ran three Kickstarter campaigns, won one major award, and got nominated for four others. During this period of enormous change, the blog has been one of very few constants in my life.

In those six years, I’ve flirted with making the blog pay for itself. You valorous and magnificent Patreon backers cover my research and web hosting costs. And the blog drives a little traffic to my books on DriveThruRPG (not much, though). But over the past year, it’s become clear to me that my work on the blog will never pay a decent wage if I keep doing what I’m doing. Making my writing pay will require me to treat it as a full-time job, and I just don’t have the time or the financial security to make that shift.

So this blog is now officially a hobby, and I need to treat it like one. When I come back from hiatus on November 14th (November 7th for Patreon backers), I’ll update the blog every other Tuesday, instead of every Tuesday. I’m also going to stop posting excerpts from Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs every month. Those two factors combined will reduce my workload by a third, moving me from writing 40 new posts a year to 26.

Existing Patreon backers will not be charged while I’m on hiatus. New backers won't be able to sign up. It might be the case that existing backers might lose access to the back catalog – let me know if that happens and I'll fix it.

If you see me reducing my output by a third and want to take the opportunity to cancel or downgrade your pledge, I totally understand.

When I get back from my break, if I find I have extra time and spoons to devote to this blog, there are a couple things I’d like to do. First, I used to appear on the Dicegeeks podcast every other month to talk through recent posts with the ever-delightful Matt Davids. That podcast no longer runs, and I might like to start appearing on someone else’s show doing the same thing.

Second, I’d really, really like to group posts into thematically-related trios (three sieges, three investigations, etc.), put each trio into a single pdf with some nice layout, and sell ‘em on DriveThruRPG for a few bucks per trio. That way folks who don’t like monthly subscriptions can have access to my back catalog in a format that they actually own. $2/month on Patreon for the whole back catalog is a better deal, but some folks like owning things, and I respect that. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, but every time I’m about to start work on it, something else always comes up that needs to take priority. So hopefully one of these months I actually can start doing it.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Leave me a comment (below) or hit me up using one of the methods on my contact page. I’m all ears!

As always, thank you so much for your patronage. I'm humbled and deeply grateful that you think my work is worth supporting.

V/r,

Tristan