Chapter five of Mutual Benefits is now up! The Patreon poll for the next written piece will be up sometime tomorrow. You all know the drill by now.

Sorry about going silent for the last week or so, by the way. I always feel this weird guilt when a piece is nearing completion, almost as if I’m “not allowed” to make a new blog post when a written piece is close to being done and yet I have nothing finished to show yet. My thought process basically goes like, “well, if I have free time to write a blog post, I should be putting it towards finishing the darn thing instead of writing a silly blog.” That said, a surprisingly high number of you read my silly blogs, and I appreciate you all very much for that.

Chapter five is a bit of a transition chapter. I have a few of those in every one of my multi-chapter stories, and on their own, they can be a bit of a drag to write. A lot of chapter five of this story, without spoiling too much, is connecting the dots between events that have already happened and events that are yet to come. Whenever I need to do the setup, I sometimes want to hold off on releasing a chapter until two are completed, then release both at once, with an explanation upfront that I think the two chapters need to be viewed back-to-back. But, for heaven’s sakes, some viewers don’t like that I take up to a month to finish a chapter as it is, so I’d rather give the viewers what they want at the end of the day.

Besides, I’m not exactly the greatest judge on how well my stories will be received. I honestly thought Mutual Benefits was going to flop on arrival and no one was going to care about it, but it quickly became a weirdly popular story by my standards. I genuinely thoguht Teacher’s Threat was going to surge and become my most popular story by a mile, but it got around the same view numbers as my other stories, and did surprisingly poorly in terms of ratings on one or two websites where I thought for sure they’d like it. That sort of stuff happens, but it has taught me that my readers are much better judges of my stories and how they’ll be received than I ever could be. And honestly, I’m perfectly okay with not being good at guessing which stories of mine will find success and which ones won’t. It’ll allow me to keep writing whichever stories and plots and characters I want guilt-free without knowing, “Ooh, I shouldn’t write about X plot, people won’t like it” or something.

Anyways, it’s 7am where I am and I’m dead tired after writing and revising for too many hours in a row so I’m going to go lapse into a twenty-four-hour coma. I’ll talk to you all next week.