Letter to the audience
A quick update regarding the Substack. TL;DR I'll be posting once a week on Sundays for the time being, with an aim to return to twice a week circa Christmas/New Year's
Note: A good deal of this may be me simply waffling on/whinging about things, primarily to synthesize several ideas on what/how to handle this Substack with the rest of my life.
Ok, so it's been around a month since I last posted anything, and for this, I do apologize. To provide perhaps needless context, when I started this Substack, I was unemployed, and only recently (end of July) have I been able to secure a steady job. Balancing that semi-erratic (yay retail) schedule with this endeavour has proven a significant problem, especially after a year of being able to write following my own nature rather than having to scrounge for and set aside random times for this pursuit, something that seems to thoroughly reduce my enjoyment of, and consequently, my desire to, write. Certain personal complications have also become moderately more pronounced due to these disruptions, and though I've taken steps to reduce their effect, those steps only further reduce the time I have available and sap further physical energy.
All that to say, a certain degree of adaptation has been necessary on my part, and shifting my expectations for myself as it relates to this Substack has been the most challenging part by far. (especially as I 'know' from the previous year what I can deliver to you all, and calibrating my expectations of myself accurately to the time I have available is rarely a strength of mine) Further, the fact of the difference between what I have been able to do and what I can do now has hindered my creative impulses as it appears that disruptions to the schedule I had developed as part of this admittedly ad hoc operation kill that part of me that can just lose itself in the process of writing about the lives of the characters bouncing around in my head.
Hence this piece of likely self-indulgent wankery to alleviate the guilt that failing to deliver on previous explicit and implicit promises to you, my audience, has produced. Something I had hoped to avoid, as, in a strange mixture of perhaps naive cynicism, I have strived to keep this creative endeavour separate from any and all personal matters on my end, precisely because I think that too much of recent entertainment has been either a soapbox for the inane ramblings of those with no one else who'd listen to them, or simply had far too much of the writer blatantly present, either as a self-insert or simply something created purely to cater to themselves, rather than to tell an entertaining drama to an audience.
Even writing this hedges closer to those pitfalls than I ever thought I'd permit myself to tread when I first created it, though to my mind, a good respect for the time you've all been kind enough to invest in me warrants that I relate to you why I have failed to uphold my promises.
As to what I intend to do to redress these failures on my part, part of the objective is the writing and publishing of this; I suppose 'letter' is the correct word to free the fountain of words from the block that has covered her and to keep you all advised of my goals for this Substack, at least one of which is to grow it into enough success that I can reduce my hours at work, or even fully exit that job to focus wholly upon this. Lofty goals for an amateur, I suspect. Though, what value is a goal if it isn't just at the edges of your abilities?
Regardless, I will be reducing how often I publish to once a week on Sundays for the time being, with Wildling's Woe and Conquering the Stars on alternating weeks so that both stories can progress at a reasonable pace. As and when I've settled into this revamped routine, I'll likely begin by adding back the Iron Age prompts first, likely on Tuesdays, as that is usually a day off for me where I can devote more time and energy to finalizing them before releasing them to your eyes. My current expectation is that I'll be able to do so sometime between Christmas and the New Year. I'm also toying with the idea of writing something like this letter about once every season to keep us all abreast of how everything is progressing. If you'd like me to do so, or if you prefer I don't, please sound off in the comments.
As always, thank you for reading, and I hope to see you return for the coming tale this Sunday.