State of the Serial - June 2025

Holy shit there's so many of you now. Wow, okay.

Hi! I'm Vora. I write This Magical Girl is Mine, the web serial that you are all presumably here to read. This upcoming week is break week, so I thought I'd try to slip in a little bit of extra content and share the state of the serial and my plans for the future.

First and foremost: TMGM has been an amazing success. Royal Road is almost to 2,000 followers, which is a huge milestone, and the Patreon is right now hovering around $750/month, only $250 short of my goal. If I can get to $1,000/month, I will feel financially secure and able to both contribute to rent/bills and have a regular food budget. My hope is that I'll reach that as the serial continues to grow, though growth is slowing down considerably now that I'm off Rising Stars.

It makes me so happy to be writing something that people are excited to read. My last project, Feast or Famine, was creatively satisfying but ultimately not very popular, which meant I couldn't afford to prioritize working on it over job and life stuff. TMGM, on the other hand, is something I am fully committing to as my highest priority. I do not want to miss a week of updates for this project.

To that end, although we are technically coming up on my break week, I will probably be writing through it. I need to rebuild my backlog, both to make things easier on my editors and so that I have a bit of a safety net if I crash hard and can't finish a chapter in time for the weekly updates (as almost happened this week).

I also want to do more community engagement! The serial has attracted a fair few Magic: the Gathering players, and I'd like to start running events on the Discord. So far I've seen interest in mostly Standard, Limited, and Commander, so that'll probably be the bulk of things, but I'd love to introduce more people to Dandan or Canlander. No strict ETA, but for scheduling I'm thinking Friday afternoons.

Lastly, I've seen some talk in web serial spaces that a good way to grow a Patreon is to offer a single advance chapter for free. How would y'all feel about that? I'll only do it if I can get an extra chapter out for tiered patrons first, but I want to hear if this sounds like a good idea.

Thank you, everyone. You're the reason I get to do what I love.