May 2019 Newsletter (Patreon)

Howdy, patrons! May has been both a very exciting and very challenging time on my end. Let's dive in!

Crazy Woman

That's the name of the piece heading this newsletter! The full picture involves naked boobies, so I figured I'd crop it for the header. You can see the full picture attached to this post. 

This picture was made to embody that archetypal energy of destruction in the service of new life. Crazy Woman is the forest fire that rages, and in the wake of its desolation, the soil is enriched and the forest grows back stronger than before.

After not being able to draw for a lot of the month, letting myself just paint was nice, and Crazy Woman is what came out.

Store Opening

Did I open the shop last month or this month? I don't remember. Either way, it's been a wonderful experience! I've really, really enjoyed it. I did end up going with Shopify, and turns out I do make enough orders to cover the monthly fee. Just goes to show you need to have an actual open shop before you judge how much you sell!

I spent some of this month sprucing up the shop so that it actually looked nice, and added a handful of items, including Belfry & Tamberlane keychain, a Clumsy Belfry keychain, a Climbing Piper Keychain, ebooks of Chapters 1 and 2, my digital sketchbook, and even an Eeveelution coffee mug!

On Monday, I'll be putting up my Coffee Eeveelutions series of keychains, so keep an eye out!

I've enjoyed having something to work on in my downtime, assembling packaging or packing orders. Thanks to you guys for getting me over my reluctance to mail things!

Whatever Happened to Those Special Offer Stickers?

Oh my god, guys, I'm so sorry this is taking so long. For whatever reason, our normal sticker manufacturer took FOR. EV. ER. to return with a cut line for the stickers. So long, in fact, that after a month of waiting, I cancelled the order and went with a different manufacturer. (Plus, their last order for us wasn't very good! >:( )

The stickers should be arriving HOPEFULLY sometime this week. It is in the mail, currently in Queens, NY, and will be making its way to the west coast.

As soon as the stickers FINALLY arrive, I'll be fulfilling those for everyone who pledged during the Special Offer drive.

Welcome Packages

This month, I got the survey complete for $25+ folks to get their Welcome Packages! I'm so excited to fulfill these! I JUST received the postcard prints and will be fulfilling those this week, along with the keychain commissions from earlier in the year.

Other Merch Fulfillment

This is the current WIP design for the Treehollow Society enamel pins! I'm still making tweaks, and still deciding if I want to add a ribbon around him that says "I Support the Library Arts" haha. 

When these are completed and delivered, they will be sent to all folks who have contributed over $1,000 to this Patreon over the years, along with your Society membership cards!

In addition, I've received the keychains for Year 1 and Year 2 lifetime pledgers. There are hundreds of those orders to fulfill, so I'll be sending them out in waves. We're handling the shipping cost on those so we appreciate your patience while we budget!

Technical Difficulties 

You might have noticed that there hasn't been a new page on the $10+ tier the last two weeks. And, there's a Guest Comic break between chapters all of a sudden. There's a reason for that!

The app that I use to write my scripts bugged out on me a couple weeks ago. For whatever reason, it dumped a handful of early pages in the script, but kept the later ones. The technical team behind the web app has been working hard to figure out what happened but what it means is in the meantime, I am scriptless.

Now, the good news is that it shouldn't be too hard to rewrite it, since it's taking a lot longer than expected to fix up. The bad news is, of course, I don't want to use that web app again. I'm going to be making the jump to Scrivener, which is a similar tool but with local copies.

Why haven't I started that yet? WELL.

Since my bum is still hurting from the surgery wound, I STILL can't sit at my work computer upstairs. The good news is we've put together a good setup for me downstairs so I can work on the couch. Part of that set up is a new, beastly laptop that won't melt into slag like my older laptop when I use CSP. (Which, between that and the mini cintiq, thank you. This would not be remotely possible without you guys!)

(Mmm, yes, gaming performance. I am definitely the target Gamer Audience: I def need ridiculously high specs to play the sims and rimworld, yes)

(but for reals the specs are great for art and I'm really excited!)

Well, my laptop arrived last week, and unfortunately it arrived with a faulty WiFi card. Our 5GHz band was getting 1mbps download. (For reference, we should be getting 50!) So after about 24 hours of frustration and troubleshooting, I returned it and got a replacement sent in the mail.

That laptop arrived last night and it is BEAUTIFUL AND PERFECT. I'm in the process of setting it up for work and then I should be off and away in the next two weeks, writing scripts in Scrivener and getting more pages and sketch requests done. Zoom!

In the meantime, look at the fan on this laptop. SO MUCH COOLING

Flare-Ups and Solutions

While I am frustrated that I STILL can't get back to my normal routine, I am so happy that we have the means to figure out workarounds, and that is because of you guys. Thank you thank you!

This month has seen a couple of really bad fibromyalgia flare-ups. In fact, about half the month was spent in too much pain, fog, or fatigue to do hardly anything. I've been doing the best I can to balance taking care of myself and pushing through when it won't hurt me.

However! Good news abounds! One of the reasons this newsletter is coming on June 1st instead of May 31st (the horror!!!) is that I wanted to wait until after my doctor's appointment yesterday. 

I have a new GP (since my last one... vanished??? cool thanks bro) and she is wonderful! I have started a new medication, Lyrica, that has a decent chance of helping to manage the pain. It will be a slow ramp up in dosage, so no idea when or even if I'll see relief (it's effective in maybe 30% of fibro patients), but I'm excited to try!

In addition, she approved me finally for a permanent handicap parking pass (I've been getting new Rx's for temporary passes every 6 months or so for the last few years), and also got me a prescription for a wheelchair!! I'm so excited! Wheelchairs make outings so much better, y'all!!! I can actually participate in group activities downtown!

Though with the Seattle hills, maybe group activities will become wheelchair luge lol!

Anyway, she also got me a referral to a local Fibromyalgia clinic, so I'm gonna try that. 

If you want to know more about fibromyalgia, I found a really good video yesterday that really helped me understand what's going on in my body and how to treat it! It's an hour long, but I watched it at 1.5x speed and it was still easy to understand. She doesn't talk very fast! 

New & Upgrading Patrons

Hey y'all, welcome to the Patreon and thank you so much for your support! I love each and every one of you!

Welcome to JReqtheK9, Dana and Kodi to the $1 tier! I hope you've been enjoying the week-early pages!

Welcome to Josh to the $3 tier! I hope you have enjoyed getting to peep extra content posts on here! 

Welcome to Goldenrod Fox to the $25 tier! I can't wait to send you your welcome package! 

That's All Folks!

Thank you so much for your support through this rough month. It means so much to me! I can't wait to continue creating for you. Have a happy June, and I'll see you in the next newsletter at the end of the month!

...And also, like, much sooner, in other content.

Don't forget to check out the full version of Crazy Woman in the attachments!