ixi

Sabbatical

I feel awful about this but, some issues never got taken care of. One of which is despite trying, I can't get a handle on my work-a-holicism. Now this normally wouldn't be an issue, but I have a kid, I have pets, I have a house. And I want to be here, especially for my kid while she's a -kid-.

I've tried. I've tried for years to get this under control, but I'm tired of fucking it up. Cold turkey is the only method I haven't tried, so, I'm going to give it a go at least for a little while and do it properly. So I'm taking a sabbatical.

What does that mean for Patreon? I may still publish things here. I'll probably switch it around at a later date how I'm going to do it, but I'm def taking at least a year off. Any writing I get to a polished state I'm happy to share, but, that's about it. I understand if y'all need or wish to pull support from me on it, that's fine. When I come back I plan to make an announcement first, so if emails are on and you follow me here you should get it. (I'm pretty sure, anyway) If that's the route you'd like to go. :)

I'll still be writing and drawing, but one of the reasons I'm doing this is to finally, fully, explore things for me and only me. Something I haven't done in over a decade easy. 

tl;dr: I may not post here anymore for at least a year. I understand if this is a deal breaker! But I felt bad for not letting folk know so they can make the choice what they want to do with their finances.

ty all so much, but I need to do something I've never done in my life and put me first. Hope all goes well with everyone. <3 

Lykke: Promo Image

This is the big announcement for Lykke! :D Which will start posting here the first Saturday of every month. I'm currently going monthly with Lykke as I have no plans (yet) for this to be serialized, so I'm taking my time learning how to edit with it. 

Remember this will be for $5+ tiers.

Name: Lykke
Authors: ixi (Planned by GiaZeries)
Pitch: Lykke is a genderbent retelling of the little mermaid where Pallas has rescued the drowning Aline from most certain death which causes the merhimbo to fall in love and the chaos that ensues from there on.
Posting Schedule: First Saturdays of every month

Some information: This is not going to be the final edition. Remember, early access means you're getting access to my first draft (which is a polished variant of my draft 0 method, where I make it as presentable as I can). There will be errors. What you read may not be in the finalized product. 

Comments and Feedback: I'm not seeking critiques (detailed pointed breakdown of my work), but I am seeking input. This is optional, but feedback is how writers grow. I have a critique group and alpha readers I trust to help me formulate everything behind the scenes, which you will not see reflective in the writing (save for grammar choices, I do use those before sharing. Everything else is going into Draft 2).

Even if someone's said something you agree with, please state so or even "+1" as this information is very important.

December 2020 Monthly Update

Hey everyone! Been quite a month with November. For NaNoWriMo I worked on 3 projects where I finished the draft for SxE, continued my dev edits for Lykke, and even started MDIAMG! :D 

I broke 100k on the 22nd, and have since taken a lower break, focusing on planning MDIAMG out more than where I had it. I managed to swing a 22k day for a record for an in-sever event with Bookdun, so I'm super proud of myself but omg never again lol. 

For Milwordy I'm sitting on 106k, which is 23k ahead of today's written goal so far. December is a busy month with all the birthdays and such I'll be juggling, but that's okay! Being ahead means I can take extra days off if I need to. 

But this month, specifically this saturday, the first chapter of one of my novels drops for the early access tier ($5+)! So keep an eye out for that ;) And I hope y'all enjoy the trip. 

November's prompt was asked in discord since I only have 2 people of that tier, so I plan to probably stick to that while I work, though the prompt will be finalized and submitted this month so no worries just getting into the rhythm of things :D 

That's about all I can think up for this update. There's going to be a post explaining more about early access chapters that'll go up tomorrow so be sure to check that out as well. ^^ 

NSTB: October Contest Entry

TW: Hints of child abuse, violence towards child

This is a short story of Jinera's origins in Iotera, as well as what's happened to Clef since Lithium. ;)c (This is a link). 

Comments are enabled on the document if you'd like to leave any. ^^ A huge thank you to my alpha readers for helping me polish this up. 

The Contest: To take 2 tarot card meanings and apply them to a story. The first is your character (The Fool), and the second is the path, (Five of Swords). I tied for 2nd-3rd (not sure how that works?) out of 4 entries but it was awfully close, two of the entries were light years ahead of me and amazing joys to read that I hope to see come to fruition as something. 

But I hope you all enjoy. ^^ If you want to comment on it more in depth you're free to do so here, since I know google docs can be a pain other than shorter commentary and reactions.

Subreddit is live!

It's empty save for the welcome post + the intro post, but I'm working on it. It'll be slow going until NaNoWriMo is done, but hopefully after that lots will get knocked out of the park. ^^

Feel free to stop by, and Backers get their own flair if you want to let me know your username if you join. :)

Oct-20: Patreon Overhaul, Rdy for Writing, NaNo, and Milwordy!

Welp, swinging wide so lets go! 

The Patreon is done! I have some graphics to finish up, but that's going to take a bit longer than I'd like admittedly. I'm still waffling if I'm keeping the stories how they look or not, but, we'll see. It's good for now but if I have anything more as a WIP I'll need to resort to something else because it's getting pretty long. 

But also: The website got overhauled! It's also a WIP for graphics and some content for the stories and challenges information, but it's an excellent start. I plan to try to finish both of these before November hits.

But the tiers are legit done. Make sure you're on the tier you want to be on before November hits and you're charged for something you don't want, and as always I'm open to questions should you have any. 

I do want to add 2 more tiers, one involving critique and world-building, and another about optimizing workflow, but I'm going to wait on those as I don't imagine those will be too popular and I need to make sure everything flows well.

So what's up in November?

Oh lots of things. 

NaNoWriMo2020 will be kicking off, which I'll be swinging into pretty hard because I'm starting Milwordy on November 1st. 

NaNoWriMo, aka "National November Writing Month", is an annual challenge to try to write 50k of a story in one month. That's 1,667 words a day. 

Milwordy is an unofficial challenge that for 1 year you write 1 million words. Yup, 7 digits. No clue if I can pull it off but I want to try. You can follow my progress here, and I'll be posting about it on twitter and Discord. The Deadpool on there are 'bets' people are pulling. If I hit the bet, they have to draw me something. This is mostly a joke thing as I have friends who keep wanting to draw to motivate me and it feels so weird so this was the agreed work around. 

I may be joining a spotlight in December in Bookdun to talk about my past work; which is horrifying concept. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to. I'm also going to be joining r/redditserials as soon as I have something done and ready to go for it. 

I'm not sure what else to add to this, but yeah, remember to check your tiers!

Patreon's long overdue overhaul

It's coming this week! I'll post when I'm done, as the tiers will be adjusting and everything so everyone can make sure they're on the teir they wish to be. 

Thank you all for being incredibly patient with me while things have been setting up. 

Discord's Live!

That happened faster than I thought it would, eyy?

So, the bot will no longer be automatic to joining Discord; if you want in, you gotta join yourself. :) This is to help so those who don't want to have to be in don't have to. 

The rules have updated, and there's been some tweaking, so be sure to read over the rules, especially the first post, very carefully! 

But, server's live to the public too so feel free to jump on in if you'd like!

If you find yourself 'being kicked' after logging off, it's because you're not picking the 'I agree to the rules' role. This is automatic. 

Discord Will be offline for a lil bit!

Due to an overhaul and a few things I want to attempt, and try to get settled, I'm going to be booting people out of the server until I get it all lined up and how I'm working. Give me 1-2 weeks max, hopefully sooner. (I'm taking a bit of a digital break with it in the meanwhile hence the time frame). 

Purpose of the booting is because lots of bot activity, role testing and lots of bouncing around and I don't want this to be distracting. Save for some dead channels, nothing is being deleted, so your history + stuff will still be there, no worries! 

I'm sorry for the inconvenience and we'll be back online ASAP ^^ TY for your patience!

Mar-20: Recap

Our first month! We hit the ground running a bit, and I'm still figuring out exactly how I'm doing this. but so far considering the virus and kidlet suddenly home for 2 months, I've gotten quite a bit done. 

Remember currently everything funnels into Discord. I'm uncertain how I want to go about this otherwise at the moment so be sure to join in on the backer's discord if you haven't. :) 

Future Plans:

• Just make it through homeschooling during the CoronaVirus
• Percolating some fun lil community things but we'll see based on activity. I especially want to give love to the lovelies who keep good-day alive, y'all make my morning. 
• Camp NaNo: I'll be partaking in April for 20,000 words towards AtS. 
• Would like to finish AtS' rough draft in April. 

Work Recap:

Iotera: AtS: 

• Word Count: 24,711
• $10 Tier: 2 Chapters completed, can read up to Chapter 11 in Alpha. 
• $5 Tier: 3 Snippets this month (we started a week late), and a bonus.
• Overall progress: The outline had to be redone because some huge changes in part 1 has me remodeling part 2 pretty severely. 

Misc Work: 

• 1 Fanfic Chapter was completed for all to read.
• 1 Contest entry completed for all to read.
• 9 art pieces
• Lots of rambling and catching everyone up and setting everything up. 

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 

Updates are coming.

Overhauling a lot of things.  Yes I know, been a while of radio silence and I am sorry on that. Trying to figure out what is best for myself and for the lovely folk who believe in me and support me (that would be you :) ).

How do you prefer to be updated on work? With me moving more into a novels due to my wrist, I'm aware there isn't a lot for you visually speaking to see.