Dear patrons,
It's that time of the month, when we sit down by the fireside and discuss where to send the stratometaship hurtling next. When I bare my bear and sole my soul with you.
From May till now this patreon has grown intensely. We're at around $600 dollars now (the actual amount Patreon displays is not entirely accurate because of declines and payment issues).
UVG was a fantastic trip to write and I'm excited that it's getting ready for a hardcover kickstarter. That should (fingers crossed) start in mid November. Witchburner was also great fun to write, and_hopefully_will provide you with a good bit of Halloween fun. I'm preparing a freebie version of it (stripped to about 10 pages) and setting up an itch.io store for it, and other similar books in future.
Your response has also been wonderful. Your comments, kind words, and money (let's not forget that) mean the world. It's the kind of stability and encouragement that makes art and writing feel feasible. I still have to regularly pinch myself, but I'm getting there.
I'll be very honest: I would like to write and draw full-time. To do that I have multiple options, but on Patreon I have basically two: 1) grow the number of members (which we're doing) and 2) publish stories more often.
I would like to try and up my posting schedule to 1–2 times per month.
Besides an increase in quantity, this also increases my flexibility.
I have a second large work outlined, that I will start publishing chapter by chapter from this month, which recently got it's non-working title: Red Sand Blue Sky. Here is the introductory spiel:
The greatest city of all, the City of a Hundred Gates, Ebét far away across the Seas of Moonbeams and Fog and Poison, beyond the farthest reaches of the limber golems and the swooning maidens of the liberties, has fallen. The mystical rationalist army of Iks has brought down the corpse-fat empire of the Flesh God and now its timeless vaults are ripe for plunder. The offerings and sacrifices and jewels of millennia await in the sands.
It's a brutal, darkly humorous, quarter-by-quarter and week-by-week breakdown of the aftermath of an imperial conquest and the subsequent looting of a sprawling, city-sized imperial necropolis. 28 major city quarters, 50 odd flow-chart tombs and vaults, 100 weeks of things going down between the invaders and the locals. And lots of art.
It's going to be another year-long project to complete.
But, I want the freedom to also share other, smaller projects in between. Small things, done right, like the Glass Merchant's Palace from UVG or High Field above, or a 16-page rendition of the Blue Pyramid, or a deep dive into the Dungeon of the Purple Worm (pun intended), or a supplement detailing the spacefaring Stratometaship (and rules for swords in space, I guess). I also want to give you, the patrons, more opportunities to decide where and when we'll go.
Thus the topic of this poll: Would you like that?