A few more musings · 4:19am Dec 9th, 2017
Don't worry, folks-- I'm not drunkenly internetting tonight, so you're safe from my random discoveries of long dead Canadian folk singers.
So yeah! I'm chipping away at For The Pony Who Has Everything, with the goal of having it wrapped up (oh hey crimmus pun!) by the 25th, if not much sooner than that. And while I'll probably be able to get that taken care of, I've reached a little bit of a snag in that I know how I want the story to end ... but I'm not quite sure how to get there. Also doesn't help that I'm not used to writing Starlight & Trixie. This is what I get for trying new things! Still, if you haven't read the first chapter yet, go ahead and check it out-- I get entirely too much gratification out of people commenting on stories, even (especially) if they're in progress.
I've been working on some other non-pony projects though, which is fun. I'm still riding the NaNoWriMo habit of writing stuff (nearly) every day, so yaaaay on that. Or something.
And, in other news, looks like a decision has been made for me. Or something. As every now and again, I gave vaaaaaague consideration to starting up a Patreon-- mostly as a thing to keep me writing regularly, and maybe make a little beer money. Very little beer money, as I imagine the number of people who'd throw money at a George MacDonald Fraser/PONY mashup is very, very small. (What is the most successful pony patreon, anyway? And/or the most successful fiction one in general?)
Buuuuut, that's not gonna happen now. As Patreon's re-worked their payment structure to add a 2.9% + .35 cent fee to EVERY pledge you make. Meaning if you support a lot of Patreons at the 1 dollar level (as a lot of folks do) the fees add up quick. Cause the kicker is, when you pledge on Patreon, it's all charged as one thing to your credit card, so the per-pledge fees look pretty fishy. It's a pretty naked money grab, and it absolutely sucks for people who are on Patreon. Here's to hoping the hue and cry will get Patreon to walk things back-- or, barring that, that a bunch of people abandon Patreon for an alternative (I've heard Kickstarter's trying to do something similar with a program called Drip, but it might not be a thing yet).
I don't know all the details of just WTF's going on, but you're smart folks with access to google, you can go learn more. The takeaway on my end is that I'm just gonna keep writing for free, so, uh, lucky you guys, right?
Maybe you could try to just get people to send money via PayPal? I dunno how tiers would work in that scenario. hmmm :\
Turns out it wasn't a naked money grab and they turned it around in under a week! After doing more damage to Patreon's userbase than anything else they could have done and making people aware of all of their competitors! In other news, why the heck do I have this post bookmarked in my reviews folder?