Big news for July, AKA writing smut is my career now (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

It is July the 1st! We are now officially past the halfway point of the year. 2020 has been a complete wreck in a ton of ways, but ... we won't focus on that. I'm not saying that issues don't need to be raised and addressed, I'm simply saying that a Patreon blog post for a furry micro macro fetish game ain't the place to do it.

A quick note. This will be quite long, and it's mostly a stream of thought. If you don't want to read all of this, then simply scroll to the bottom, where I have included a TLDR.

Regardless, due to those issues, specifically the pandemic, as of Friday last week, I am out of my job, as in, I was made redundant. There's no reason to overcomplicate it or go into the ins and outs of it, the simple fact is that I am out of gainful employment, effective now.

For a lot of people, this would be an issue, but fortunately for myself, losing my job was actually something of a godsend. I won't go into detail. Simply put, I will not miss the stress that it brought to my life, nor will I miss working 12 hour shifts.

Of course, there are stressful things that come with losing your job, the most important of which being finances, which can extend from things as simple as raw cash to things as convoluted as health insurance. This is also the first thing that other people worry about. As soon as you tell anyone that you've lost your job, the first thing that springs to mind is finances.

So, with that in mind, I would like to assure everyone that I am completely and totally fine when it comes to money. While I'm certainly not going to be going on any expensive vacations or eating out at fancy places any time soon (or should I say ordering in, considering) I have managed to accrue a decent enough financial safety net. Combined with some lifestyle changes, I should be just fine in terms of wealth, at least for a little while.

If you are wanting to help me, then the best thing to do is to spread my name amongst your various circles, if you're a part of any. If you're following me on Twitter and you see me tweet a link to the game, consider liking or retweeting it. If I post something new on FA, toss it a favourite. Word of mouth is the most valuable support of all.

I'm not going to look any gift horses in the mouth, however. I have a Ko-Fi available and such! I don't want to sound ungrateful because the truth is that I'm incredibly grateful. But my focus is very much on attempting to expand what I do into a full time career as an artist. Donations are helpful, of course, but a single follower due to a retweet or a like can lead to someone who might be a frequent commissioner from me, or a new Patron. It's the classic 'give a man a fish' thing.

With all of that said ...

I am going to give this whole being a professional amateur writer a shot. There is no better time in my life to try it. The stars, as they say, are aligned. I have a relatively successful Patreon, a decently sized fanbase, and a steady stream of people commissioning me. Being able to have a job related to writing has been a dream my entire life. There is no better time for me to try this out than now.

There are going to be some changes around here as a result, but nothing that will be overly alarming. I am going to introduce a couple of new tiers to Patreon that will help you guys add to the game. For the existing $10 tier, I am going to be running far more polls for future content. I want people to have an incentive to stay here, and I want people to have an incentive to join my circle. 

I don't want to start thinking of my Patreon as a business, so I'm not going to. That's not my angle here at all. I see e-mails about Patreon customer retention all the time and I blindly ignore them, not out of ignorance or anything like that, but just because they're not really my style. With that being said, though, I can absolutely see more ways that I can add value to this Patreon now that I have more time on my hands.

Because that's the thing. Even though I have more time on my hands, I'm not sure that development of the game will speed up or increase to the point where we're getting a new version number every other week. The thing is with erotic writing, in my case at least, is that I very much have to be in the mood for it. If I'm not in the mood for it, then I can't write it. It's really that simple. So I need to look at the amount of 'erotic energy' or whatever that I can channel before I know how much development on my games will speed up.

There's also commissions and such to take into account. I checked my wordcount for July, and between my games and my commissions, I did Nanowrimo once and a half, or, in other words, wrote around 75,000 words. That's not including the time that I spent proof reading and whatnot. That was while I was employed, so it's not like I've ever been lazy on this front. In effect, I've almost been working two full time jobs over the past six months ... which explains why my health has been going to hell.

But I only have one now! At least, for now ...

With that said, my goal while I was employed was to try and get a full version update of A Tiny Furry out every month. Since I never quite achieved that, I will now be aiming for that here since I am trying to make this my full time job proper. One version update a month in the form of multiple weekly previews, just as always.

However, having more time on my hands does mean that I will be able to engage with my community more. I want to run more polls about the game, I want people to be able to decide the speciality or some kinks that will appear in the next update, or choose the character that will star in it. I want to pick peoples brains about what kind of scenarios they'd like to see the characters get up to. I want to find out what you want to see in the game. That's my plan on doing with my work time when I can't channel the energy to write smut.

Essentially, the more patrons I get, the less commissions I have to take, which means less of my creative output has to be put into commissions and can instead be put into the game. Even when you're not looking at it from a business perspective, it makes sense to make Patreon more appealing to the players of the game. I have a great platform here to be able to speak to people who are really dedicated to the future of this game. So, more polls, more community engagement, etc, etc. That's the basic plan. That, combined with a couple of specialised Patreon tiers (coming soon) will fill this place with more use than me just posting a game update every couple of days.

In other words, expect a more active and vibrant Patreon for this July. I will be pulling out all the stops and trying to throw up a poll or two between updates. Things might be a little shaky as I get used to what questions are best to answer, so please bear with me, and understand that this is all incredibly new to me.

A new preview build will be coming out in a few days, likely July 4th or July 5th. Just in case you missed it, I posted a fresh new preview build last night. Between then, I will try to post a poll and a story preview. I want to try starting to update this place on as close to a daily basis as possible, without being too spammy.

Thank you for reading! And if you didn't want to read all of that, which is perfectly understandable, then here are the cliffnotes:

I lost my job

I'm trying to do this as a career

Expect many more polls

Expect updates to be slightly larger as I push toward trying to get a full version out every month

New Patreon tiers coming soon

I also posted A Tiny Furry update last night if you missed it.