What's Going On:

Yes, hello~ I'm aware this post may come as a surprise, or not, all things considered. But I owe you all some explanations as well as being transparent about plans and such! 

Last you all heard I was switching from Patreon to Ko-Fi which was true! But any time I make a financial decision fate likes to knock me down a few pegs and remind me of some things. That aside, some other things have cropped up, so this will be a pretty big post covering a few things.

The Depression:

In Aug. 2018 I severely hurt my wrist. It's RSI, there's different types, if your wrist healed from it quickly you probably had a sprain not an RSI so please stop giving me medical advice you're not my doctor. I appreciate the well intentions but it always comes off condescending like you did something right and I'm clearly doing something wrong. Yes, this has happened so much I need to list this here because this crap does not help someone.

The damage is enough either it may, one day, ease (but maybe never cure), so long as I take action to care for it. I may be able to improve it with surgery, but our health insurance is 50% OOP so. :) Not an option currently. 

We are going on 2 years of the injury now, and I have been making changes as I can afford them. At the end of the day the results have been overall the same: I cannot draw like I used to. Speed has been severely reduced, and any long term work hurts like the dickens. While I have, and still am, experimenting to find what works and what doesn't, it doesn't change the damage this has done to me mentally. 

Drawing has been a type of identification for me. My work, a sense of pride. Having been properly shot in the knee, as it work, has wrecked my mental process, my confidence, and has caused serious depression - which for the longest time I opted to ignore. This led to me eventually crashing and burning in isolation, which is never good to cave to. 

That said? I cannot make a career off drawing. I can, however, still write, which means I've had to face some serious ingrained fears about it that I've never really faced before. It's easy to ignore these when you're people pleasing, but you can't really do that when you're working for yourself. :(

So I've been needing to figure out how to move forward with this knowledge. I would love to still have my work as comics or something, but I would have to pay someone else to do it, or wait to release full chapters on my own over the course of months because I cannot do the weekly update schedule. This is an option I am willing to pursue, no worries there. But for the time being? No, they're off the table for my health sake. 

I am still battling a lot of mental stuff right now. I can't get in to see a therapist until we know our financial situation and with me still neck deep in applications, and hubby's reroute coming up? I'm SOL until at least end of April. But, I've decided to refocus and put my brain where it's always been healthiest: Working. 

Patreon:

Patreon is getting the overhaul it's long overdue for with my rebranding (6 years in June! Holla at me, because some of you were there! Ooof we old). But due to the new direction I will be pursuing, everything needed cleansed so as not to confuse future backers as to what services they will be supporting. 

No more eggs in one basket, I will be stretching across all platforms, and they will all funnel down into Discord. Now, no worries. Whichever platform you choose you will still get the same updates and rewards, it's all about both your comfort and mine. So if you rather go through paypal, we can arrange such. Ko-Fi? Same thing. You name it, I can work with it to set it up. I've even set things up for people who wish to gift others Backerdom status.

All Backerdom areas will receive a monthly update to keep you up to date on everything behind the scenes in terms of creativity. Any contests I've entered, original work, fanfic work, all of it in one big go. These will go out at the first week of every month. 

All Backerdom will work off 3 tiers: 

$1 general support, access to spoilers, and monthly progress.
$5 mid support, access to snippets, concepts, etc weekly in the discord.
$10+ top support, access to alpha reading any of my rough drafts in the discord, be the original, fanfic, contests, etc. 

There are tentative plans in place how to handle everything past alpha stage but currently, this is all set up.

What about previous systems, I hear you ask? All gone. No requests, no commissions, no adopts, no AP, no nothing of the sort. I cannot live and juggle multiple lives like that. If I were to bring back commissions, it would probably be a waiting list of a singular commission slot at a time, but this is nothing I'm looking at right now. 

If this is a deal breaker for anyone I completely understand and wish you well. 

Any milestones will be towards getting myself stable and keeping up fees. Past that, it will begin working towards hiring people to help me in my passion of story telling. These will be worked on at a later date once I know our financial situation better.

Discord:

There is a public / backer discord built solely around my work. This is my work server, and while it has some public access, the general purpose is for people to keep up with my work on a more frequent update. I would love to be able to build a community around such things, but we'll see how it goes. 

Do you have to join? No. But if you've linked your discord through your account the bot will make you join, but only the backer channels. The rest of the public channels are up to you to opt in to. :) I recommend reading the message in the Welcome channel over this one. 

I do recommend joining however, especially for those of the $10+ tiers, for the time being Alpha stuff is only being linked in Discord until I figure out how to get this across all platforms. :) That said if you'd like to join, here's the link: https://discord.gg/MUY9Dkj  

I think that covers everything!

Feel free to ask questions if you have any here or in Discord. The poll is still up for now, so lets get into what I'm up to:

Planned Work:

I have joined a group that encourages writing a book every 6 months. This competition has greatly helped my mindset and gives me purpose, something I have been seeking for years and having a like-minded group has done wonders for me. For 6M1B summer challenge 2020, Iotera Along the Seam is being drafted :) If I complete it well before the end, I will put it on break to work on Wolf Hunt, a fanfic I'd like to finish that is as long as a novel (rip). Oovutee fanfic will be posted as it gets edited, and is only 8 chapters (drafted, currently ch1 is up on Ao3). 

For NaNo 2020 I have a book already outlined and ready to go, and for 6M1B winter 2020 I'll be working on Tineolha, as it should be shorter and let me hammer it out before NaNoWriMo hits. 

I also have a contest I'm entering which is due March 17th. I'm a back up entry for my team, but I still have to have it in for sure just in case. It's drafted, and will be available for alpha reading in Discord. 

And that's about it for the time being! Hopefully things will smooth out and get easier, but heavy lifting is a go for the start! I will be slow to pick a updating all platforms save for monthly updates so please be patient with me, and thank you. <3