Weekly Update - 1/26/22 - "Happy In His World" (Patreon)

Hopefully everyone enjoyed our little celebration posts earlier this week, including v2 of the Quaranteam Visual Guide and the unscheduled Quaranteam 35, as my way of saying thank you for reaching 200 patrons. I'm already starting to think about what I'll have to do for 300, but believe you me, that'll be bigger than this, assuming we get there. I'd like to get there! I believe in you. I believe for you. 

Work started in late last week on converting my internal notes into a more formal cast list for Brewster's Brood and that'll go out on Friday, along with Brewster's Brood 8, although I will have them in separate posts, so that people can go back and refer to them as often as they want. (I know there was a suggestion that I do recaps at the beginning of story posts, but I'd much rather you go back and reread the last chapter in the series, if you need to do that. I can, however, include a link to the BB CoC (aka Brewster's Brood: Mrs. Churchill's Notes) on each BB post, if people think that would help.

Even though I did post Quaranteam 35 yesterday, that doesn't mean I've changed, and Quaranteam 36 is on the schedule for 2/4, as agreed upon (and as some of you voted on). Clever eyed readers may notice in our last weekly update I didn't give a number for the next chapter of QT that I was posting, and that was because I planned on releasing 35 early, as part of my saying thanks.

The schedule is also going to hold for 2/11 for Brewster's Brood 9 (and 10 for 2/22) and I've decided to make Janus Coins 2 to be what I'm working on for 2/18 because I like the idea of coming back to that story before it falls too far from my mind. 

Just the way the weeks fall next month mean Tuesdays are at a premium, so QT: Phil's Tale 4 will be on one of the earlier ones, but I don't know which one yet. In fact, I'm not at all sure what I'm doing for really any of the Tuesdays of February yet, other than being able to confidently say that one of them is PT4 and the last one is BB10. I might try and squeeze another mainline QT chapter in there somewhere or maybe another If I'm Honest chapter, but I make no guarantees about that. I'm trying to ramp my dance card up in a way that feels manageable and doesn't tax my writing beyond my capabilities, but I also like the idea of challenging myself at least a little bit. I'm being vague about the timelines because I don't want to disappoint anyone if I'm trying and failing. 

Part of the reason I'm doing this, let it be known, is that I'm probably going to start pushing out the exclusivity time on the writing here, from a month to maybe two or three. (That doesn't affect my Patrons at all, but I do keep these weekly posts visible to everyone, so people know what I'm working on and when to see it.) A couple of the other writers who are mining the same space that I am working in have sent suggestions that pushing out the window of Patreon exclusivity helped their numbers grow a little bit, and to do that while still putting out regular content to drive eyeballs here, I just need to generate more content. I don't know that I'm up to that, but I want to try and push a little bit. A couple of the more established writers have six-month exclusivity from their Patreon before public release, and they told me that's been working out pretty well for them. If I'm trying to get out a consistent 5-10k word content release twice a week regularly, that's aggressive, but maybe I can work up to it.  

I'm still likely only going to release 1 content release per week to the public sites for the foreseeable future, so even with BB (which isn't going to be released in chapters to any public site ever) taking up 2 slots in a month, that means, on average, I would still be having 6-7 content releases in a month, giving me 2-3 releases buffering. I may eventually ease that off, releasing a couple things to public sites in a given week, but with this becoming both a significant revenue stream and a significant time sink for me, I want to make sure it's doing what it needs to, and for at least the short term, that means trying to up my game a little. (I also have one private commissioner, who gets a private release a month, and that also has to fit into my month somewhere.)

I'm thinking out loud, mostly, but I like keeping The Corrupted (as I've taken to calling you all) informing on what at least the next 3-4 weeks looks like as I see it. One thing I learned from developing enterprise software for a while -- any plans you make beyond about a month's worth of time is basically just Wild Ass Guessing©™. So February will be an experiment in me trying to amp up production and seeing if I can do it. Best case scenario, there will be new story chapters every Tuesday and Friday for the month of February. Worst case, you get PT4, BB10 and two sections from Old Times. 

The last Friday in February, 2/25, will be voted on by Tier 3 and 4 subscribers starting soon. As per the rules, nothing that's got a defined chapter coming in the month will be on the list, but I might use the second and third place things in that poll to help me determine what my other possible floating content drop will be for February (as one of them is likely to be another QT chapter - I know where my bread is buttered). That means for Monthly Vote 2 options off the table will include: QT and Janus Coins, but everything else is up for grabs and there will be some additional new paths in there also. If I'm trying to get to a reliable 8-9 content drops to patrons a month, having multiple stories for me to bounce around between will help a little in that I'm always jumping over to something fresh, even if we do get to a regular schedule of QT getting 2 drops a month, BB getting 2 drops a month and QT:PT getting 1 drop a month. That's still just 5 things, with 2 more being voted on by the tier 3-4s, and 2 for dealer's choice, where I can dabble in what I want to (assuming it didn't come up). 

That sounds aggressive as fuck to me right now, but I also remember my days in the newspapers decades ago where I thought the idea of typing 20k words a week was insane, and I made that happen for a while, so maybe I can make this work too. I've still got plenty of Old Times to fall back on in weeks where I'm stretched thin due to non-Patreon work, but February is looking a little light in terms of outside freelance work, so this should be good test month where I see what scalability looks like.

Everyone on board with that? As always, thanks for your support. (I keep feeling like I should say "Don't forget to like and subscribe!" but I'm not on YouTube, so that doesn't really apply, does it?) If you're part of communities you think might be interested in my work, feel free to refer them over here, over to my page on Literotica or EMCSA, or give them the link to my publicly visible taster of Brewster's Brood - Free sample of Brewster's Brood! | Corrupting Power on Patreon 

This week's bit of music is "Making Plans For Nigel." It's a song by the band XTC, but I was thinking of the Primus cover, so here that is... See you all on Friday.

making plans for nigel - YouTube