Welcome!

Glad to see you made it this far! 

I decided to make a Patreon page, because if I can get enough support here I'd love to be able to write full time!

If, somehow, you're here and don't know what words I write, check out The Laptop Hero here.

I don't plan to promote my Patreon page until I have ten or so extra chapters built up here for the Cheddar tier (thus five for Swiss), something I hope to happen in May or June, as I plan to keep up my writing pace, just limit my releases to Royal Road somewhat. Maybe to every other day, at least while I build up my surplus.

I might need to slow down to writing five chapters a week, too. I don't want to burn out. Right now I'm having fun so the pace isn't too bad, but I do recognize this pace isn't likely to be sustainable long term. Maybe I can, though? We'll see.

I do need to decide how I'm going to release chapters, as my current process is a bit messy and could use some optimization. I write in emacs—yes, that emacs, in org mode, if you know what that is. It lets me type my words without getting distracted by all the formatting nonsense. Emacs is pretty good at manipulating text, and, honestly, I've wasted so much time configuring it to my exact specifications it would be a real shame to lose out on all that work.

My current process is to export my chapter into html, which locks in my monospaced font on the tables thanks to the !important css setting I use in my export settings, before pasting the html page (from Chrome, NOT firefox, because apparently that matters if you want to keep the formatting intact) into Royal Road's new chapter form.

I also paste my chapter into Google Docs to grammar check and proofread, because while emacs has those tools, and I use the spell check, the grammar check on Docs is just better. Google Docs doesn't keep my table formatting though, so I can't use it as part of my chapter assembly line. If I figure out how to make that work I'll be golden.

I also have this problem of posting a chapter, then reading it and finding five or ten little things that need fixing. It doesn't matter how many times I read through the chapter immediately after writing it. I probably need to let each chapter sit for a day before I go back and edit them. That's the advice I've seen elsewhere, anyhow. I'll try it after the Writathon.

Because I know there are going to be typos and changes, my plan is to be able to give my patrons links to the "living" versions of each chapter on Google Docs, whereas the copy/pasted text for each Patreon post would remain unedited text, because I'm not a masochist. Google Docs also allows for downloading a document as an epub ebook, pdf, and a handful of other formats, so people who prefer to use such files could easily get them, without me needing to do extra work.

As a side bonus, those who feel inclined to point out typos can do so right in the document. I know some slip through my checks on occasion. It bothers the perfectionist in me, to not catch every little typo, but I have learned sometimes one must accept imperfection and move on, else all remains static, for we are imperfect creatures. It's a lesson I still struggle with, as, alas, knowing is only half the battle.

Not that I'm even using so many tables for the formatting issue to be a huge problem right now, lol. I can always do the end Status page as a separate thing to copy over into RR with the right formatting. Or I can do something really crazy, stop trying to fight the system, and edit my tables within RR like I assume everyone else does. We'll see how it goes.

I do need to play around with a few tables and see how Patreon handles them, too. No idea what it is going to look like on their end:

This is a table!This is also a table!

Page break below

I'll see what those all look like when I put this from html into Patreon.

...Not great, it turns out. A search suggests patreon tables aren't a thing. Here is the copy straight from emacs, which is probably better.

| This is a table! |

|-----------------------|

| This is also a table! |

|-----------------------|

Page break below

------

Might be simpler for me to just link to Google Docs and leave it at that? Or use the raw emacs text for pasting here, and people can deal with seeing /italics/ instead of italics.

At this point I'm not even sure how much interest there will be for my Patreon. As my grandfather liked to say, I might be counting the cart before the horse.

If you're still reading my ramblings, again, thanks for checking out my Patreon! I love writing, and if I can get enough support to do this full time that would be amazing!

(End of April Edit: I gave up on emacs, lol. The options for editing such files on my phone, keeping it all synced with dropbox, don't quite work, and I'm in situations where I'd like to write on my phone often enough to need something reliable. Losing about an hour of writing convinced me to just stick with google docs.)