Please imagine a pithy title about fresh starts here.
(crossposted from Patreon)
Coming into 2024, I had big plans for how I was going to get back on track and get back to posting once a week and yeah, obviously, that hasn’t happened.
But what I have been doing is looking at my Patreon and at my own projects and figuring out some things I need to do differently. Last April, I changed my nom de plume because I wanted a fresh start. Now it’s time to give this entire Patreon project a refresh.
Here’s what’s happened so far:
- Deleted my old A.F. Linley website and gave up the domain; the cost for hosting has risen by $200/year and I wasn’t using it as much as I thought I would back in 2018. Also I kept getting spam emails through the contact page.
- Took down my Smashwords account; the single title I had managed to self-publish, a short story collection called Creeps, Ghouls and Jewels, had some serious formatting issues that it was not going to be worth the time/money to correct. Plus, I’m not happy with the changes that have come since Smashwords merged with Draft2Digital. (I’m considering moving to Payhip for future self-pubbed titles but that’s a discussion for a different post.)
- I’m starting the process of taking down my Redbubble shop and....Okay, actually, I might have done that already? I just went to grab a link to the site in case anyone wanted to order a Moonicorns t-shirt before I deactivated but uh, it looks like it might’ve deactivated itself? Anyway, merch isn’t the right direction for me at this time, but I’ve still got all the actual designs and I really do like the “Finishing Things is Hard” logo, so I’m definitely going to hang onto that and slap that onto some stuff at a different print-on-demand site in the future.
Here’s what’s happening next:
- New posting schedule: Starting in April, patrons will receive one short non-fiction post every week (500-1k words) and a piece of fiction every month (2-2.5k words). Oddments posts will continue to be free to read, but these take a decent amount of research and will be sporadic, basically happening around patron-only posts.
- Revised patron tier perks: Getting rid of physical rewards and adding more digital ones. More details to come.
Current and long-time patrons: Thank you for sticking around while I get my shit together. I say that frequently. I mean it every single time.
Potential new patrons: Hello. I have just met you, and I love you. My name is Ethan, I live in a 200-year-old house and I’m writing a novel called The Lion’s Paw. It’s set in 1925 and is about an immortal queer disaster woman and what happens when 400+ years of terrible decisions catches up with her.
(I will neither confirm nor deny that she was inspired by H.G. Wells from Warehouse 13.) (Yes I will confirm it, she totally was.)
There are séances and ghostly possession and psychics, there is historical romance, and psychological horror, there are haunted houses and artists behaving badly and a lot of ladies making out.
I post about my writing process and all the weird little historical niches that pop up during my research. Frequent topics include:
- Spiritualism
- Cryptids
- Historical curiosities
- Medical quackery
- Weird tech
- General oddball occurrences and serendipitous intersections of history, folklore, and culture
And sometimes when I’m really bored I write short fiction via random prompts.
If any of that appeals to you, please consider subscribing! I’d love to have you along for this journey and my caffeine habit needs all the support it can get.
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Banner photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash.
