April Through June Newsletter (Patreon)

Published:

2021-06-22 17:23:00

Imported:

2021-06

Content

Hey all! As you can see, I skipped a couple newsletters during my break, so now it's time to catch up! Let's dive in to what happened over the last few months!

The Great Break of 2021

As I realized that I was trying to keep a lot of plates in the air and barely scraping by at one page a week, and my fibro was acting up making everything harder, I realized it would probably be a good idea to take a little break. My original plan was to take about 2 weeks off, with 1 week of that for full recovery and 1 week for getting as much work done as I could before I was under deadline again.

Well, between some commenters, patrons, and my husband, I decided to extend that into a full 2 month break with a goal of hitting 8 pages in the buffer before I resumed. (And then 10 pages, once it was clear that would be easy to hit.)

This break was so good for me. It helped me take as much time as I actually needed for my health, let me do some projects for myself, and build up that huge buffer to keep posts going (and Patreon rewards more juicy).

And as it happened, I had a lot of fibro issues during the break, and had to take some time to process my friend's little girl's fatal tumor. (They're trying to raise money to install a lift in their house; any money you can spare would be much appreciated!)

As a result of the break, I'm in a much better place physically than I was before.

Health

I took a lot of time during the break to focus fully on the harder kinds of self-care, since I had the extra energy to deal with it. I've been eating better with lots of veggies and fruits. I've been able to institute a daily meditation and gentle fibro-focused yoga practice. I'm catching up on a lot of doctor's appointments I missed over Quarantine. I've been delving into deeper, harder topics in therapy. I've been trying to add new meds to my cocktail to handle some of the things I haven't had the mental bandwidth to tackle before.

Overall, while there's no miracle cure, I'm in a better place to keep moving forward instead of eternally treading water.

Getting Back Up to Speed

That said, I'm still struggling in a lot of ways to get back up to speed. Improving my health doesn't eliminate chronic illness (though I wish it did!). My brain is still very disordered lately, and trying to get even daily lists down on paper has been a struggle.

Unfortunately, this has meant a few things have been falling frequently through my fingers. My helpers are all pretty much on standby because I haven't even had the mental fortitude to tell them what to do for me.

Newsletters, postcards, and patron correspondence has fallen by the wayside. The Tales from Treehollow comics have been completed for ages and I've been too mentally drained to tackle the PDF composition. I've gotten quieter and quieter on the Foxglove Comics discord. Most nights are spent drained and exhausted on the couch, barely able to even engage in hobbies because I'm in a fog.

As you can tell, right now I'm trying to chip away at some of these bigger projects -- this newsletter, for example. The only way forward is through. But thank you for your patience while work happens a little unevenly right now.

Tales from Treehollow

We're in an interesting place with the TfT comics. There's a large backlog of comics that haven't been delivered to their patrons yet and I don't want to move forward with new ones until everything is kinda smoothed out again.

I'm thinking it might be better in the future to have TfT comics release every *other* month instead of every month. Or maybe just when they're done? I'm not sure. But I'm going to adjust the cadence a little to make things easier.

In the meantime, I am deciding if, once the PDFs are delivered to the appropriate patrons, I'm going to release them all to the store at once or one at a time. Will I keep it patreon-code-exclusive for a month as promised? Or will I unleash it on the public at the same time? My priority is getting more money in creator's pockets faster, and I just don't know which is more likely to do that, nor how important it is to patrons to get that early access to purchasing.

I dunno. Lots to think about.

Quarantine Ending (Locally)

In my state, we're about 70% vaccinated and so things are opening up a lot. Probably adding to that mental fog is the fact that I've been doing non-stop ~events~ with people in my life as folks catch up. I am exhausted. It is time for me to learn boundaries and manage that a little better. But it's a bit hard to set boundaries when there's birthdays and father's days and things like that!!

Eh, it's a process.

But if I'm less responsive this week, it's because I'm a hermit hiding under a blanket and hissing at people who try to talk to me. :E

Patreon Sketch Requests

Throughout the break, I kept up on sketches for $50+ folks. Here's some of them!

During the last month, a slot opened up in the $250 tier, who get a colored sketch commission from me every month. Here are a couple of those that I did:

The $250 slot is still open, so hop on it if you want monthly commissions from me!

Warrior Cats D&D

As I said, I've been able to take on personal projects over the last couple of months! In my spare time, I've been noodling with the idea of running a D&D campaign for a small group of friends based on the book series Warriors. This is a book series for tweens that has been published since 2004 and has roughly 80-some books in it, and when I hit 30 I gave it a chance and fell in love with it. What can I say? I love animal fiction with a dose of angst and darkness.

So my husband and I spent some time rejiggering the D&D 5e rules to work with feral cats, and since it's going to be its own little PDF made using the Homebrewery, I decided to do some paintings to fill up the illustrations.

Here's Silverstream, fishing in the river for RiverClan!

And here's Breezepelt chasing a rabbit on WindClan territory.

In addition, I've used it as an excuse to learn Python and Flask to make a Warriors name generator as a web app. This is still very much WIP, but you can check out the in-progress version here.

Posts That Went Live April Through June

News

Page Updates

Early Pages

Commentary

Early $10+ Preview: Page 259

Illustrations

Tales from Treehollow

Shop

Patrons Who Joined, Returned, or Upgraded

There was, understandably, a lot of fall-off during the break so HUGE thank you to folks who joined, returned, or upgraded! That means you, Nolan "Note Worthy" Slover, Cory, Javi, Prator, Thornwolf, Moonrabbit55, Rikreim, Daniel, and Shepard!