November Newsletter (Patreon)

Hello, all! It's the end of November here for me, and a lot has happened! Especially since the last newsletter in July. Whew. What can I say? Time is hard to hold onto this year.

What Happened in November

Systems and Scheduling, Oh My!

I've been doing a lot of work on my end to try and shore up my organization skills, so I can make sure balls don't get dropped as much. Case in point: this newsletter! I've been exploring lots of options for how I can keep everything on my plate and I've found a lot of success.

So far, the things I've adopted are:

I use my Google Calendar much more now. Turns out when you allow yourself to move blocks around when things change, it's a lot easier to not be so overwhelmed. In the past, it felt like if I didn't adhere to the explicit schedule I set out for myself, I'd failed. But now, I just mostly use it as a visual checklist, and I adjust the amount of time I spend on things to a rough estimate after I'm done, so I have a record of what I did that day. It's not foolproof, but man, it's helped a lot.

Every day, I also put together a list of my tasks for the day, which will grow or shrink as things change. (Usually grow, lol!) This has helped me keep on task and keep in mind what needs to get done soon. I've been populating this in conjunction with Google Calendar, because I've been putting to-do-list items as blocks of time on future days, so I can check what I have on that day already and go from there.

I plan to check out Todoist to see if my new more flexible take on productivity will help. In the past, I've tried it before and gotten in the same "oh no I have due dates and I missed them" problems, especially when I have to go back and edit everything and BLAH. Anyway. That will probably turn out fine.

Next one's a two-fer. First is Airtable, which i've been using to coordinate on pages with my helpers. It's SUPER fantastic, and much more robust than Google Sheets! 

Secondly, I've been using Biscuit, which is a browser made to keep all your platforms in one easy-to-load space. That's the sort of window wrapper around Airtable that you see up there. I can swap between apps without loading, they each can support tabs like a browser, and it's really helped me keep everything together instead of in disparate tabs. It's free; highly recommend it.

Anyway, that's how things are going on the organization front. Answer is: pretty well!

New Merchandise

I've made a lot of new merch this month, both for the holidays and just for fun! From top left, there are greeting card packs, a not-so-ugly Christmas Sweater, package stickers, a 3D Belfry Floof mousepad, and a wooden ornament for your tree! Plus, for the last half of November, there's been free shipping (up to $25) on orders $50+, and since Black Friday, 40% off select items in the shop!

I'm not super great at scheduling this stuff yet, but I'm working out a cadence and figuring out what's the right balance between too much advertising and not enough. I want to make sure people know about it, but I don't want to inundate them with the news, ya know? But merch is part of how I support the comic, and one day I'd like my living room to be not quite so full of Inventory TM, so I push how I can!

The package stickers, you'll notice, didn't have a link to click. My husband thought it would be a great idea to make some cute stickers that I could put on outgoing packages, and I agree! I've ordered them and hopefully they'll arrive soon. There's some demand for purchasing them as well, so they'll go up once I get a feel for how they look in real life.

Hired Hands

Because of your support, I have been able to hire new people on to help me. GASP!! It has been chaos on the backend while I try to figure out how to support a pipeline and also be a boss. Hope/Panda Assistant has been helping out for over 2 years now with social media and with posting pages on Patreon and mailchimp for me, and my friend Marsha has been helping with postcards for the last year as well. But now I have flatters!

I hired three flatters to help me out: Lauren Pierre, Nakata Whittle, and Leah Briere. All three are fantastic artists  and creators in their own right and you should definitely check their stuff out! Already it's helping me out SO MUCH to have someone else handling the flats on these pages, oh my gosh. 

I also have hired on Nicole 'Thornwolf' Dornsife to help me with marketing cadence and also writing the marketing copy and some of the social media posts! I've hired her a lot in the past, and she's SO good at what she does. She helped me write and plan the Chapter 3 Kickstarter, the previous Patreon relaunch, and more. She's already wrote the marketing copy for the items linked above! She's damn good. Check her out if you need help with your own Patreon or Kickstarter or whatnot!

This sounds like I own an empire now! And that's a lot because of you guys helping me out. Although I'm not an employer and I'm just paying for a few hours of these peoples' time a month, having the financial freedom to do so is such a relief. And it means the comic keeps getting made. :D

Bonus Comic: A Glow in the Dark

Speaking of comics continuing apace, Jonas is hard at work on the 5-page bonus comic coming out on December 5th! Make sure you're pledging at $5 or above on the 5th in order to get the comic delivered to your inbox!

Today's the last day to get your name in the PDF so hop to it if you haven't!

Guest Comic: Preeny Has to Repeat 6th Grade

Also as part of extra comics this month, I drew a guest comic for Preeny Has to Repeat 6th Grade! If you haven't read this delightful comic, you should. It's a love letter to tween creativity, and most of the characters in the comic are adopted designs made by kids. It also, like Tamberlane, is a fun and wonderful world with a cute and endearing story that takes a sudden dark turn, and handles darker concepts. It's also heartfelt, hilarious, and wonderful.

It is by far one of my favorite comics online. You know it's true if I took the time to make a guest comic for it! Go read it if you haven't already! 

Whew, that was a lot of typing.

This month has been a busy one! Or maybe I just keep better notes now on everything I'm doing. 

Posts That Went Live in November

Pages

This month's comics were stunted slightly by the need to draw a million freaking backgrounds.

• Page 238 
• Page 239 
• Page 240 
• Page 241 

Commentary

• Page 240 

Illustrations

• Treehollow Society: Discord Emotes 

Bonus Comics

• Heart Questions has been Distributed 
• (Upcoming) A Glow in the Dark 

Polls

• Vote for February's Bonus Comic 

One of the backgrounds painted this month, and one I'm very proud of. But also. Ow. "You can ease up, Caytlin," you might say, and that would be true, but one of the reasons Tamberlane exists is so I can practice my backgrounds. And I really do love painting them. They just hold things up a little bit...

New, Returning, and Upgrading Patrons

My sincerest, greatest, lovingest thanks to the following patrons who joined, returned, or upgraded their pledge this month: Timmainsson, Dragomuse, Martinifang, Matthew Bradley, Hidemi Aoki, Makovette, Richard V., Alex Beckman, Steven Miller, Kyle Conroy, Otakawaii, TitanSlayer100F, Ysenhal, NoName+, Daniel Leroux, Moonrabbit55, and Julia. You guys make all this possible, and I'm so grateful to have you here!

That's it for November's newsletter. Hopefully I'll have more great news for you in December!