Announcement

Hi everyone. This isn't good news unfortunately. I won't bury the lede: I'm deprioritizing Ascent and D&D, which means a hiatus in the short term, and in the long term, I don't know what yet.

The first thing I want to do is thank my patrons who have supported me these past nearly 3 years. Your contributions let me focus on writing these two stories as my main project and produce over a million words of niche content difficult to find in long-form even on the sprawling archives of the internet.

Unfortunately, after a frank evaluation, if I want to make writing my career, it’s clear that this niche is too niche. The audience isn’t large enough to support a full-time career, not for where I live and not with the inherent instability of writing as a profession. The Patreon has stabilized at a barely livable wage for the past year and a half, and it’s clear there won’t be any more significant growth. I never expected it to become as successful as it did in the first place, so for that I’m enormously grateful.

But yeah, I need to shift my attention to more mainstream writing if I want to make a career out of this. Two stories at once is already a bit hectic; adding in a third would be too much. Therefore rather than reducing my release schedule, I’ve decided to go on hiatus and give full effort to new projects. That’s the smarter long-term decision.

Part of why I’m doing this too, I admit, is that the content limitations on what I can write while remaining on Patreon are frustrating. There have been many instances throughout these two stories where I wanted to commit to less ‘monetizable’ ideas, but couldn’t for obvious reasons. I even got a content strike for the recent Ascent scenes! I think it was automated, because of some of the verbiage I chose, but it was a major wake up call that this page could get banned at any time, and that erotic content is even riskier of a career choice than the already-unwise idea of pursuing writing full-time to begin with… 

Also, in a similar vein, I feel like I’ve exhausted a large majority of the sex scenes I wanted to write, at least inside the restrictive policies of sites like Patreon. I don’t like repeating ideas, which is somewhat funny since I managed to get >1,000,000 words out without running into that issue. But it does feel like I’m struggling to come up with new sex scenes I consider different enough from what I already have, that wouldn’t also get me demonetized.

While I’ll be on hiatus for the short term, once I figure out more reliable income sources for my writing, I might return (with a more casual schedule) on a platform like Reamstories, which is a Patreon alternative with more forgiving policies. Or maybe some other platform where I can really write whatever I want. That does sound appealing.

I want to catch D&D up to a better stopping point with the reunion scenes, the dates, and at least formalizing the relationships with Sofia and Jordan, as has been led up to for so long. Ascent halted in a less awkward place (if in the middle of a scene lol), but I don’t think there are any major unresolved plot threads that are nearly as frustrating as the aforementioned, besides maybe people wanting to see Astrid get some action. So while I might finish the active shard and keep writing Ascent sporadically as well, that’s lower priority.

It goes without saying that I encourage you to cancel your subscriptions! Your support was truly invaluable over this formative period of my writing career, and I’m glad I could create a hefty quantity of words for you to enjoy in exchange. The only reason I’m not closing the Patreon entirely is because
1. I might return with a looser schedule at some point
2. Patreon is changing their % cut soon, so if I pause the page it will forever have lower royalties when I reopen it. (Patreon really is amazing, isn’t it?)

And 3. For anyone who wants to keep supporting me, even if I won’t be producing content (just temporarily, I think, but who knows), I won’t decline, lol

Once more, let me say thank you. Ascent and D&D started out as passion projects that snowballed into surprising successes, and I learned a lot and had a lot of fun writing them. While I wish I could finish them (and I might, over a much longer period of time) two hefty million-word serials would take years to complete, which isn’t something I can commit to. Especially since this Patreon is going to take a massive hit; I need to establish new income sources as fast as possible.

Don’t be too worried for me, though! Feel free to cancel. My tentative experiments with more mainstream genres last year went well. Focusing on it with my full effort, I don’t think I’ll struggle too badly.

Hope this explains my thought process.

All the best, and thanks for reading,

Winter