And writing. WIPs will go up in Discord. I'm so insanely tired from getting back into the rhythm of my life that I can't bring myself to write a more elaborate update post today; I'll try to make up for that on Monday.

Ao3 got my ass. I received a warning and an imperative to remove all self-promotion from my profile and the works. That includes "(Commission)" at the end of titles, etc. I had no idea Ao3 has a strict non-commercial policy, but it's one of those things that immediately makes sense—Ao3 is too big and too legit not to have a policy like that, or else they'd eat a ton of regulation that they probably can't afford (or don't want to put up with).

No harm done and no hurt feelings from me (assuming what I did was good enough and got the restriction lifted). Might hurt outreach a bit, but that's the kinda thing I try not to worry too much about. And there's a silver lining!

Instead of links to substar posts, the Ao3 stories now link to MEGA folders with the stories. Naturally, there's one bigger folder that holds the story folders, and that can be a new subscriber perk! Substar was a good file storage upgrade, but having files live on individual posts just isn't ideal, so moving to MEGA is an important step up in terms of having a browsable archive of files.

I'll make a discord channel that the MEGA archive can live in—for now it only has the public posts (so, everything but WSB 2 as of time of writing) but I'll eventually make two archives, one public, and one private, so that subscribers can have everything all in one place, and non-subscribers everything else in another place.

I fly out to Japan on the 16, Thursday afternoon, and yeah, I didn't get any of that HWNL writing done. Hey, I'm on vacation.

Edit: took me like 3 minutes to clone the archive and add the WSB chapter that's still sub-only. There are now two archives, and I'll do my best to keep them both updated appropriately

White Stained Black Ch2 released over the weekend—that one ended up being a heavy hitter, and I'm really proud of how it ended up developing. Still, it took a lot out of me and took longer than anticipated to finish—kind of a recurring theme. I'd rather get more accurate with my time estimates than work faster—I like my pace and I think it allows me to create good, meaningful work, so it'd be great if I could ballpark release timing better than I do now. Something to work on, and not the end of the world.

Ten days until my trip. I may or may not start on the Heroine Will Not Lose recap—writing WSB 2 while getting affairs in order for the trip was stressful, and I'm enjoying my reduced obligations right now. But I've trained myself to get nervous after X days spent not writing, so I'll probably start on the recap if nothing else—I have frankly no idea how large or small it'll be, just that I want to summarize the HWNL chapters, editorialize them a bit, and include character primers so that new readers can get a general understanding of the thing before Season 2™ starts up.

I'll probably start work on it on Thursday, but no guarantees. If you're in the Discord, WIPs will go up there, though they probably won't be all that impressive since, again, this is supposed to just be a brief synopsis of HWNL (can you hear me talking myself down from making it into a Big Thing?).

Anyway, ten days until I skedaddle, I'll do my best in that time, I'm already on soft-vacation, thank you so much, take care of yourself.

I'm already looking forward to being back, because then I won't be living in anticipation of having to go somewhere, do something, and I'm just the kind of person who frets in the face of pending obligations.

Dealing with Stella Starr and a Case for Markus Morgan