Pausing for One Month (Patreon)

It's happening. I have decided it is a mostly good thing.

The basics:

I will be pausing billing on the Patreon. You will not be charged for one month. While the billing is paused, the Patreon will remain live, and I’ll be stopping by weekly with some type of post to keep the place interesting.

As a member, you should still have access to existing posts, new posts, and comments all month.

Your current charge date will not change. So, if you’re someone who pays on the 15th of every month, for example, you’ll pay nothing on February 15th during the pause. And your March payment should be on the 15th as usual.



The heartfelt thanks and author thoughts:

Your comments regarding the pause make me love you guys even more. All of you are so considerate and full of helpful knowledge. Thank you for being awesome.

Many of you encouraged me to keep the billing open. If I had planned a hiatus out a month or two in advance so that I could warn everyone and give you plenty of time to adjust subscriptions as needed, I might have thought of something else to do. But with this coming up suddenly, the pause seems like the fairest option available in Patreon’s toolkit.

Ironically, this happens only a week or two after I told someone in the comments that I needed to figure out how I would handle an unexpected situation that kept me from writing. I guess influenza thought it would be hilarious to help me accelerate the decision making process. 

The flow of new chapters hasn’t stopped since I posted the first one two years ago. That sounds wild to me in hindsight, but the journey’s been so amazing. I meant to take a break after Hazel introduced Manon to the hourglass. I meant to take one after Esh-erdi and Alden had their first convo after his rescue. I should have taken one at the end of Thegund. I just get excited about what’s happening in the story, and I kept telling myself I could wait for the next opportune moment. 

We see the results of that now.

I’m a little irritated with myself for not doing this last year in a more prepared way, but I’m going to learn this time. 

The end of chapter 211 doesn’t mark the end of Alden’s healing, but it is supposed to be a transitional moment in the story. He’s begun to make peace with a lot of things that were overwhelming for him during his first days in intake. He’s shed some misconceptions. He’s grown. New stuff is coming. 

It’s an okay moment in the story for me to halt the flow of chapters, and the next okay moment might not come up for months. So let’s do it and hopefully make Super Supportive a little better.


What I imagine myself doing for the next four weeks:

I’m probably going to continue to sleep a lot for the next few days. 

But then, my month is actually going to be pretty much the same as always, minus the thrill of showing you the new thing I wrote. That’s because I think what Super Supportive needs most is a backlog. From an artistic standpoint, a backlog is worth so much to me. I can see the flow of the story better when I’m revising several chapters at once. I can cut out a chapter that doesn’t work without it meaning that I’m going to have to pull an all-nighter to write a replacement. 

So, rest is on the menu. Backlog is on the menu.

There are about twenty other things I want to do for the story. I’ll probably do a couple of them. I’m trying to keep my expectations in check and make myself focus on the backlog first. I think it’s the best investment in story and author stability.

Please laugh at me when we get to the end of the month and I’m upset because I’m only several chapters ahead—which is the reasonable expectation—instead of, like, a dozen—which is my dream. 

Okay. Here I go to press pause. I feel weirdly nervous about it.




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