My Patreon is Now Fully Live!

Following about a week of work on my Patreon and its accompanying Discord server, everything is finalized and live! Hit the Patreon button in the sidebar to check it out. If you'd like, sign up for one of my tiers too!

After I did the original setup of my Patreon, I came up with more ideas for rewards. Since I wanted to expand the tiers and the numbers of rewards they offered, this was good. As much as I wanted Patrons when I first set things up, I'm glad I didn't have any. Right now, as things are, I see the Patreon page as its final version. If I change anything besides posts, it'll most likely be the Goals bar. However, I'm not really planning on changing anything, so there's that. I really don't want to.

The Discord server that goes with my Patreon page is called AEP's Hall of Patronage. Right now, it has a few honorary members, simply because they've all supported me in various ways for years prior to me setting up this Patreon stuff. I have two moderators, which eases my mind, especially since Jam—thanks for agreeing to be a mod!—is usually signed into Discord whenever they're online. My wife Tess is also a mod, but she's not always on, so I need to discuss that with her, though I won't force her to be constantly on Discord if she doesn't want to be; I mainly enlisted her aid in verifying and setting up things for the Discord.

Now for a little trivia: My favorite tier title is the fourth one, though the second one is a close second. #4 always brings a bit of a smile to my face though. Go check and see what they are! 

Changes are Afoot

Well, though I'm not actively writing on Discordant Harmonies 1, I'm still making progress on its background. Due to some worldbuilding I've developed over the past week or so, I've changed Chraest's name to Aelyshthar, finally given the star system it's a part of and the indigenous race names, and conlanged just enough to make what I have of things linguistically logical. 

This meant I had to create a new alphabet, which you can access by joining at the "Boy My Feet Are Really Worn Off!" level of my Patreon; the link is in the sidebar. I'll be posting something a bit more substantial for the "Why Don't Airplanes Wear Capes Too?" level and above later on, hopefully this morning after finishing this post—if I can just remember what the heck I meant to post in the first place. (And I've been so excited about posting my first higher-level Patreon post, too!) 

In addition to these changes, I've started preparing articles for posting to an interactive wiki-type web app called Archivos. At this time, I've got two articles written and am doing research on volcanoes to bring a little more realism to the worldbuilding of the planet. My friend J.A. Marlow is helping with what knowledge she possesses and suggestions for interesting and informative documentaries for me to watch, and I plan on researching more and looking up some books about it—ebooks from the library if I can find them. I'll be adding this information to a more mundane wiki as well, but the user interface is a bit more difficult to figure out and I don't want to start setting that up until I've got a number of good articles written. Neither of these will be accessible until after the launch of at least book one of my DH series. 

Oddly, I'm really enjoying this hiatus away from my story. Yes, I want to get back to it, but it's not tearing me apart this time around. I'm not sure how well I'll keep up with this blog, my Patreon, Twitter, and my articles for the wikis when I'm interested in my story again, but I'm determined to do better about it this time. And no qualifiers like "We'll see how that goes." I'm going to keep up with things this time. 

Patreon!

So, after years of considering getting a Patreon account, I've done so. My page is up, and I've got one Patrons-only post so far. 

I've been kind of looking forward to this step in my writing career. Years ago, I knew I wanted a Patreon account, and I've held off 'cause I haven't felt ready for it on a mental/emotional level. This is a lot of responsibility for me to take up. But here it is—just scroll down a bit to find the link in the sidebar. 

How Depression Affects My Writing

I mentioned in a previous post that I'm dealing with a depressive phase of my bipolar disorder. This affects my writing to some extent. Even with these posts and recreating this Blogger account, I'm having to fight through feelings that my writing isn't any good and that the blog is pointless. This is even more pronounced with my fiction writing. I haven't touched DH01 in days, and in fact, I haven't touched it since the 7th of this month.

Depression doesn't so much block me as make it harder to connect to the ideas I have for my writing. This is true whether I'm pantsing the WIP or have an outline for it. It's frustrating to be able to see the ideas, but have an inability to "grasp" them well enough to write them out. Back in the past when I got like this, I'd try to force the words out, following advice that it's best to write every day regardless of mood, and that didn't end well for me. Sure, the words were as good as they would have been if my mood wasn't down, but I hated what I wrote and ended up abandoning the project for a few months. Not days or weeks. Months. So now I don't try to force the words out when I'm depressed. I go with the flow instead. 

At the same time, I also have a very poor opinion of my writing. I know I write well, and that I can create engaging characters and entertaining stories. Consciously. Logically. But the depression tells me all my writing, especially the fiction, is crap. This is part of the reason why I don't touch projects I force depression-phase words onto after forcing those words. 

If I'm lucky, I can look at my stuff to edit it. This time, I'm not lucky. I've been using this down period where I'm not writing to get to know ProWritingAid software again, using their web editor one paragraph at a time. It has few complaints for the most part; I've spent long enough writing to eradicate most of the issues it highlights. The "Repeats" checker section, though, always "confirms" the depression's opinion of my writing, so I don't end up doing any editing. I'm trying to figure out how to get ProWritingAid to work best for me, and this is not helping. At this point, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. 

The worst thing about pronounced depressions like this is that I don't know how long I'll be in it. It makes me not care about my writing, and if I had a deadline, that would only exacerbate the disinterest. Even if I were inclined to pursue traditional publishing, I wouldn't be able to because of these depressive phases so it's good I've latched onto the independent/self publishing track like I have. This depressive phase may last another day, a week, a month—or longer. I don't know. All I can really say is that I'm glad I don't have these phases more often. I'd never get anything done.

What I'm Doing with the Discordant Harmonies Series

Clipped Header Designed by J.A. Marlow

Years ago, when I finished the third book of the Discordant Harmonies series, I thought I was done-done with them as well. I never felt like they were what I wanted them to be, but I couldn't figure out how to fix them to make them what I wanted them to be, so I went ahead and posted them on Wattpad. And then I proceeded to ignore them, not even reading through them because I have this issue with reading works I don't feel fit my image of them. 

Well, back in March, I figured out what the issue is with the series. DH01, A Pitch of the Scale, is, plain and simply, incomplete. I employed a lot of handwavium and Because I The Author Said So to complete that story as well. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense—like, an institution as old and well-established as the Temple of the True Gods in the Édalain Empire would, long ago, have set up an intake process for new members of the Temple. I also needed a better excuse for Géta not to report the bullies' attacks on him, and I needed to set that reason up well. 

I'm not sure about DH02, Severe Notes. It may be fine pretty much as it is. I'll take a look at it when I get to it. One thing I do know for certain is that I'm going to move some of DH03 to the ending of DH02 so it's not such a cliffhanger. What appealed to me in the first draft no longer fits the vision I have for this story.

And DH03, Measure of Resistance, is, really, quite bloated. I need to condense it, cut stuff, and generally rework the entire book to make it less cumbersome. 

So this has led to me starting the process of performing a developmental edit on the entire series. I'm changing quite a bit. Some characters are getting sex changes. Others' names are changing. I'm bringing forward characters who don't actually appear until the next book in the forms of letters they 're writing to Asthané and changing things in Géta's background, as well as setting up events for future books.

Oh, and I've finally realized "DH04" was never meant to be. At least, not as the series was originally conceived. There may be a DH04 after I'm done with the developmental edit, and the books afterward have changed substantially enough in mere conception that I'll be kicking off a brand new series to handle those stories. 

As of the writing of this blog post, DH01 stands at I think ~52k words in its developmental edit. I'm having fun with this, and feeling enthusiastic about working with Géta and Asthané again. I'm not much referring to the original draft and am focusing on fleshing out and showing more of the stuff that I glossed over and merely told in the first draft. Aside from that, I'm writing scenes that I want to keep from DH01's original draft from memory, using them as signposts on the way through this new draft. 

Overall, I'm happy with what I've got. It's a much more interesting story so far. To those who are wholly wedded to the original drafts of this story, I'll be leaving those versions up on Wattpad indefinitely for you to revisit whenever you want. The new books will have all-new covers and, I hope, will be published for sale once I'm done with them.