I sit down to write this with the sound of cool synths and drum machines on loop in my headphones. Something about listening to retrowave, chillwave, synthwave, whatever-wave feels like the future. A grungy, wonderous future perceived by so much cheesy 80’s sci-fi flicks and imaginative cyberpunk novels. Loud hair, neon lies, and the hopeful grasp of the underdog.
A retro future so bright, you gotta wear shades.
It’s the head space I’m entering as I think about the next project. Rusty ships sailing between worlds, capitalistic stellar empires, strange mental powers, space whales, and a menagerie of diverse aliens dotting the cosmos. Culture drives their worlds, and influence and style are all at the core of what makes Phased and the new novel’s setting thrive.
We spent January neck deep in that universe. On the 19th we released our first Patreon Early Access Short Story, Phased: Hand of Void. This short represents the quarterly fiction projects I’m bringing to people who sign up for the Patreon, and I’m excited to see the growth the story has caused. April will see the next story show up, but the plan is to start voting on that piece later this month. I’m curious if readers will be hungry for more from Phased, Manta, or seek out other settings I’m interested in playing in.
HoV kept us busy through January, fulfilling our promise of getting a new short story out. Yet working on the short wasn’t a one-time jaunt into that universe. It was meant to be a kickstart, a flavor test, a change to expand the range of the writer’s bible and help that galaxy come to life both for readers and for myself. It was an exploration to prep me for working on Epicus and help accelerate the progress on the next novel. And accelerate it has. During the last week of January, we reclaimed many of the various outline documents for the novel, the light drafts we had put into place, and have begun indexing and merging them into a single unified document. Charlie has a lot of work going for her, but I know her story better now. Soon, so shall you.
Speaking of knowing more, I spent time in January going over plans for expanding how much information I’m sharing and how I’m sharing it. Weekly updates are going up on Patreon every Friday. While the monthly blog post is meant to be a digest of the entire month’s cycle, the Friday updates are meant to serve as a richer experience. More exacting numbers, direct screen shots and minor spoilers of how things are going. It’s an accountability exercise for myself while keeping readers and viewers in the loop. The same can be said for the Patch Notes page that now appears here on the site, both are tools meant to provide accountability to people interested in my works and want to know their payments are being invested wisely. It’s something I like seeing from those I invest it, so it’s more than reasonable to expect others to want the same from me. Future plans for communication include a newsletter that should be launching next week. The newsletter will also be monthly, but will be less narrative and more bullet point. Essentially between the blog, newsletter, and Patreon posts, readers and viewers can decide how much or how little information they want to know about my projects.
We had a good month on the Twitch side of things. Views are up, we’ve attracted some lovely people who are coming about regularly, and we’re now officially at 3/5th of the follower minimum we need on our march towards affiliate. While officially we’re only streaming Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, we’ve started to add more days (Friday and Sunday), which has helped expand that capture net for collecting new viewers. Streams are now regularly at least 4 hours long, and I’ve started to put together a plan for what games the channel will start to focus on over the coming year. On the back end of things, I learned a bit about Adobe After Effects and made a thing. It’s the first of many features I’ll be adding to the stream as I learn more about that program, and understand how OBS’s and Stream Elements’ notification work. I look forward to seeing how the stream will look six months from now.
February holds so much potential after such a powerful January. This week will see the completion of the new outline and production begin on the first draft of Epicus. The rest of the month will include a lot of pushing forward to have the novel sitting at least 50k words deep like NaNoWriMo was rearing its head in the shortest month. Twitch streaming will officially expand to fit the new days, with Tuesday and Thursday being my official “off” days. I can’t say for sure if we’ll hit affiliate in the coming month, but we’re going to keep at it. The new raid content coming later this month for FFXIV will help with that, but the steady hand we’ve been keeping since October has been our greatest asset for growth. The newsletter will go live, and more effects will enter our Twitch stream. New pixel art variants of the Dinner First crowd will appear once I know who everyone is going to be, so keep an eye out for that. I’d also like to do more pixel art in the coming month, but don’t hold me to that. It’s the long plan, not the priority.
That’s it, our February update. I’m looking forward to sharing more over the next few weeks via the Patreon posts. Putting together the newsletter later this week will be a fun exercise, and you can expect updates on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch for when that goes live. I’m especially looking forward to seeing how the novel goes during it’s first few days of production.
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