Chapter 312: Happy New Year! [Not A Chapter]

Hello! Welcome to one of my rare “not a chapter” posts.

A new year is upon us and if you’re only reading this novel here, don’t worry, nothing is changing. I can guarantee weekly releases for the next year!

What will be changing is my Patreon. Because I’ve gotten a third book started, I’ve finally gotten around to updating the tiers. You might have noticed this already as a little while ago I added a new tier. Now, I’ve gone and renamed them as well as removed the book specific tiers. Right now there are 5 tiers, though the fifth is just a super supporter tier with the same benefits of the previous.

The tiers are thematic to me; being Hatchling, Dragonet, Dragon, Ancient Dragon, and Greatwyrm. So, seeing as the names have changed I’ll give a quick run down of what each tier gets, with any later tier having all the content the previous tiers get except for one specific thing I’ll mention right away.

Hatchling: This tier has a 7 day free trial and is the only tier with one. As for what it gives you for $1 USD? You get five chapters of NeoRealm, two chapters of Dungeon’s Path, the 20 most recent short stories, ability to vote on any polls, and right now it has one chapter of my newest book Banished Talent

Dragonet: This was the $3 USD tier I added just recently so you can read a good chunk of content. So, on top of everything from the previous tier; you get 25 more chapters of NeoRealm, 10 more chapters of Dungeon’s Path, and 2 chapters of Banished Talent

Dragon: This is replacing the previous two novel specific tiers. So for $5 USD you get content from all my novels. The main reason for combining the two is that I didn’t want to make a new tier every time I start a new story. Thus, instead of adding a tier for Banished talent, I removed a tier. Unlike previous tiers, at this point NeoRealm and Dungeon’s Path goes from a specific number of chapters ahead, you get an extra chapter every week or so depending on the story involved. NeoRealm will get an extra chapter every other week and Dungeon’s Path every third week. Uh, and Banished Talent does get a straight plus 2 chapters because I’m not exactly writing weekly chapters for it. Also, this is the first tier in which you get to help suggest prompts for my monthly short story instead of just voting on one of the prompts.

Ancient Dragon: This tier is exactly the same as it always was. For $8 USD, you get to read every available chapter of all my novels. This means an extra chapter of NeoRealm every week instead of every other and Dungeon’s Path goes from every third week to every other week. Also, at this tier, you gain access to all the archived short stories. The most recent 20 monthly stories are available to any patron, but after that I move them here as well as any random short stories I might have written in that time period.

Greatwyrm: Literally the same as Ancient Dragon. This $15 USD tier is simply for those who want to help support my work a bit more.

 

On top of that, I’m currently in the middle of setting up an alternate option for those who don’t use Patreon (and I don’t blame you for that). I’m in the middle of transferring over a few hundred NeoRealm chapters, but before the end of January (and hopefully closer to the beginning, I will have a Ko-Fi up and running with the same content as Patreon has. The biggest difference is that for all the early chapters that are currently available here, I bundled them so it was easy to post. NeoRealm is ten chapters at a time and Dungeon’s Path is five. So instead of having individual chapters with their titles, it has “[NR] Chapter 50 to 59” or “[D’sP] Chapter 100 to 104”.

I hope that by providing this, I can help a few of you who are frustrated with Patreon, but would still like to read more of my work. As for why I went with Ko-Fi? Well, honestly it is because I dabbled in it when the place started and so already had an account there. I had even test posted a few chapters in the past, but suffice it to say, posting nearly a thousand chapters is a lot of work. I’ve actually been using the vacation days I had left over at work to get it done. Now, I don’t expect a sudden flood of people, this is purely because Patreon has been acting a wee bit sketchy and I figured having an alternate for people was a good plan.

 

Now that all the official stuff is out of the way, let’s talk a little about what has happened over 2023! Over the year, I’ve released 52 chapters of both NeoRealm and Dungeon’s Path here (which makes sense with the whole weekly chapter thing) and I wrote 104 NeoRealm chapters and 78 Dungeon’s Path chapters. On top of that, I wrote 12 short stories off of patron prompts and started a third story, Banished Talent, which now has 12 chapters though I wish I could have written more of it. Though I will note, I mean Banished Talent to be a regular length book and so it is actually between a half and a third finished at this point. I actually plan to always have a third story going on the back burner with a slow release.