It’s monthly update time.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “How the hell can this be a supplemental update if there wasn’t already an update?” And the answer is a big can of shut the hell up.

Actually, it’s easy. It’s monthly update time, but I’m actually not ready to give a full-on monthly update with a pretty calendar and all that shit. But I wanted to put out something so y’all didn’t start to wonder if I’d dropped off the flat of the Earth.

TL; D Wanna R

I’m going to be away from the office for a week and it’s going to crunch the release schedule up. Next Early Access release will be August 15 and then periodically spaced out until the end of the month. Meanwhile, I’m changing the way I deliver articles and doing a bit of reorganization on the website because the way I tried to do things last month didn’t work efficiently. I’ll also be taking better advantage of SubscribeStar and Patreon’s ability to publish posts for free subscribers since I seem to be picking up a bunch of those and it’s a good way to organize everything. And I’ll be explaining all this more fully next week.

I will also be hosting a Live Chat for supporters with Discord access on Tuesday, August 20 at 8:00 PM EDT.

Three Little Hiccups

This month’s release schedule has hit a couple of snags. They aren’t big snags, but they’re pushing things back about a week and they’ll require a little scrambling later in the month. Two of the snags are personal. One is bad and involves a financial crisis I had to resolve with paperwork, appointments, and some scrambling sporadically over the course of three days. One is good and involves family coming to visit me for a week. And while I knew about that visit in advance, a miscommunication and some errors in time management on my part basically ended up with that date shifted up a week.

The third snag is the one that matters to all of you.

Last month, I changed everything. I really want to have a nice, systematic way to release content on a specific day of the week with it’s related podcasts, calls to action, and all that shit, and to publicize each on all the appropriate platforms I use, including Discord, SubscribeStar, Patreon, Twitter, Facebook, and soon others. I decided to improve the quality of the Proofreadalouds as I try to move them to a more “official” thing and I decided to make Q and Angry a real thing accessible to everyone. It’s been well-received so far so I’m really happy with it.

But to get that all done required a really efficient workflow. Apart from outlining, drafting, rewriting, revising, proofreading, and formatting every article, I was recording two podcast for each, tagging and uploading both, and then linking to everything on all the appropriate channels. I thought I had an efficient workflow and checklist, but I didn’t.

I also discovered it’s kind of hard to find that shit on my website the way it’s organized right now.

That’s why things hit a wall at the end of the month last month. All the extra steps it took to get every article published — twice; once for Early Access and once for General Access — ate up a huge amount of time and expanded into a very complicated checklist. The process needs streamlining.

This ain’t disaster-level shit. It’s just growing pains. I’ve got the steps down, now I just have to do them efficiently.

Meanwhile, a few months back, Patreon added the ability to follow creators “for free.” Basically, you’d get notifications of their public posts, but not any of the paywalled stuff. And I’ve noticed I’ve picked up a bunch of people that way. Unfortunately, I really don’t publish anything “for free” on Patreon. I publish everything here and only announce the paywall stuff on Patreon. Same with SubscribeStar.

Point is, I plan to make better use of that and it also allows me to streamline my release process substantially. I also intend to start mirroring the Q and Angry Podcast releases on YouTube.

The point is, I’ve got a bunch of background work to get things flowing smoothly and one week less to do it because I really do need to be back on a regular release schedule. That said, I’m much happier to be “off schedule” just because I need to iron out some kinks in my workflow than to be “off schedule” because I’m in the hospital, dealing with personal emergencies, sick, or whatever.

A Vague, Tentative Upcoming Release Schedule

I’m not going to put out a fancy calendar of releases today. I will put it out next week as and when I can. Even though I’ll be out of touch for a week due to my family visit, I will be working for a few hours every morning on all this background shit. That said, I can say a few things right now.

First, Early Access and General Access posts won’t be released on the same day anymore. Early Access stuff will come out on Thursdays and General Access stuff will come out on Wednesdays. At least, that’s the end goal. I need to separate the releases.

Second, the next General Access post will be published tomorrow. The next Early Access post will come on Thursday, August 15. Thereafter, I’m projecting Early Access posts every Thursday plus an extra on Tuesday, August 20 and General Access Posts will be every Wednesday starting on Wednesday, August 21 plus an extra on Monday, August 26. If that gives you crosseyes, don’t sweat it. I’ll iron it out and put up a nice release schedule.

There will be at least one True Campaign Managery Feature — probably either handling death or handling character advancement — at least True Scenario Designery Feature — on the anatomy of a challenge — a one-off article about sportsmanship at the game table and one more Feature that’ll probably be in one of the True Whatever Whatevery series.

I won’t be doing the Angry Hack this month because the workflow isn’t there, but I do have a completed — and really awesome — graphic design package for the hacks, so I’m excited to start putting them out.

Slapdash content continues to wait for The Simmer, but I will probably do a SlapChat toward the end of the month just to stay in contact.

I will host my Mostly Monthly Live Chat on Tuesday, August 20 at 8:00 PM EDT.

And that’s my current, vague, tentative plan for now. Such as it is.