Reasons for the delay and status update

Good afternoon,

I wish I was posting this with the actual update already finished, but sadly I'm not. I was hoping to get things squared away and get 2026 off to a good start, but I was actually hit with some pretty big problems at the very start of January. I thought it would get sorted faster and that there would be no need for me to update you guys, but as I'm getting messaged asking for a status update, I thought it only fair to give it. Especially because, while I talked a little bit about it in my personal social media, the TA page doesn't link to it (and has no reason to in the first place), so here goes.

My payment got withheld when I went to withdraw it on the first few days of January. As I've mentioned before, I do have the privilege of working full time on Tennis Ace, so it is my only source of income.

As I already knew from a few years ago when something similar happened, there is a 3rd-party go-between that serves to process payments between the payment processor and my local bank in my country. Those go-between banks are kinda random. Whenever I withdraw a payment, it gets passed on to one of the partners of the payment processor to then clear and send the funds to my bank account. It just so happens that a lot of my payments over the past year went through a specific go-between, and I apparently hit a non-specified quota they have. After hitting said quota, they held my payment up and demanded lots of documents to prove what type of work I do. Some of them aren't things I could properly provide (there is no contract for services between me and Patreon, but Brazilian bureaucracy is a bit behind the times and so I had to figure out alternatives).

I thought the problem could be dealt with somewhat quickly since I still had a lot of documents from when this same issue happened in 2022, but I had to re-emit a lot of them again with an accountant and chase a ton of bureaucracy, uploading forms and the likes. As one would expect, that totally killed my ability to work. Even when I did have free time, I had so much anxiety about my savings lasting long enough to get the problem sorted that I couldn't get many words on the page.

As of early this week, the problem is more or less "solved". In that they cleared my payment, but also told me that they can't/won't increase my yearly quota with that specific intermediary, so any and all future payments of mine for this year will go through different ones, which reads as there being a chance of something similar happening in the future. It hasn't exactly left me super hopeful, but we'll see.

As for Tennis Ace now:

I've been chipping away at both Keisuke and Haruki's updates at the same time, though I'll admit I've made more progress writing for Haruki. I feel a bit stuck with Keisuke's route, and I haven't been sure whether I would need new art assets for certain scenes or not, and that uncertainty has made me slower than I'd like to be.

I still don't know if I'll release a Haruki or a Keisuke update first. By rights it should be Keisuke, but I also don't think I should hold back and delay stuff longer just to keep with the preexisting update order when my writing is flowing better for a different route. Nyaruh did finish the CGs I needed for the Haruki route, so I definitely could work on it. I'll let you guys know. I hope to get an update out in the coming weeks!

Sorry again for the huge delay. Thank you for the patience!