April Monthly Update | Patreon

This is a crosspost of the April Monthly Update that was posted for all members on my Patreon. Posts archived here will always be ones that are free on my Patreon, and never feature exclusive paid content.

Hey everyone! Welcome to the first monthly wrap-up post! On the first of every month, I'll be making these blog posts to talk about what I've done on the Patreon this last month, and what my plans are moving into the month ahead. This is something I've been doing on my website for a few months, and I think it'll be a good way to help keep myself accountable to the plans that I make, and maintain transparency with you all who are waiting for the content I'm working on each month. Without further ado, let's talk about March!

A month ago now, I launched my Patreon with the prologue and first chapter of my serialized story, "The Gaia Machine". Those first two chapters are both free for everyone as a preview of the story! In March, I dropped Chapter 2, which was the first supporter-only chapter. This is generally the format I want to follow with stories posted here: free intro of a couple chapters, the rest being supporter-only. "The Gaia Machine" is a serialization that I intend to continue working on for a long time, but for stories that have a more predefined length, the individual chapters will be uploaded for supporters whenever they're ready, so you get early access to updates on new stories before they're finished and out! Supporters will continue to have access to those uploads after the story finishes, so essentially you get to read new stories for free. For everyone else, you'll be able to purchase finished works on the shop as a one-time payment for a downloadable PDF, so you get to keep that purchase forever!

In the case of "The Gaia Machine" specifically, what I want to do is slowly phase older chapters into the free category, so that as the story gets longer, the free intro will also grow accordingly. I don't have a firm plan for when these sorts of phases will happen, just know that this is how I plan to do free content for "The Gaia Machine" in the future.

So what's coming up in April? Well, "The Gaia Machine" Chapter 3 is already underway, and I'm really excited for this one! Hopefully those of you who've read Chapter 2 are with me on that. I really want this one to be a big one, and set up a lot of the story we're going to be unfolding together in this first arc.

In addition to this, I'm going to be working on the first short story that will be on the Patreon for supporters, that being a side story that takes place in the world of "The Gaia Machine". I don't want to say too much, but I think it'll be a nice glimpse into that world and help attach readers to some characters. In the future, this short story slot won't always be a side story for something like "The Gaia Machine", but I do want to mix side stories into standalone short stories, so expect a bit of both over time!

I'm also cooking up the next chapter-release story that'll be posted here. It'll have a predefined length, more traditional compared to "The Gaia Machine", but it will still release in chapters when they're ready each month, and will follow the early access layout I mentioned at the start of this post. I don't know which of my current plans will be posted first, but you can be sure that whatever it is I'll be putting my all into making it the best I can! I hope people enjoy some of these other stories I'm working on as well.

That just about wraps it up for this monthly update! March was a good month, and I'm hoping April will be even better, so I hope you stay tuned and look forward to what I have coming up!

Thanks for reading!
~ Alex Amelia Pine