So. Yeah. (An explanation of what's been going on and why I haven't posted as much.)

First newsletter in a while. I'm gonna lay out what's been going on, because this is going to help me get unstuck from the situation, and I owe y'all an explanation for my absence. My ADHD has taken a medium-bad situation and made it worse, but it was also snowballing on its own.

It began just after the last newsletter, finding out that the landlord at my physical shop was declining to renew our lease, and that we would have to move or close at the end of the summer. She thinks we're literally Satanic, and as time has gone by, we've learned that a lot of our neighbors feel the same way. At first, it was like "Haha, Satanic panic, how retro!" but it's been causing us real harm. Rumors start to morph into even bigger rumors as they spread, and they spread fast, while the truth sits on a bench going nowhere. It escalated this summer into one of our neighbors forging our signatures to tell the city we consent to them messing with us in ways that noticeably hit our earnings. We can't prove who it was to take them to court, nor could we afford that anyway. It really hurts to be treated this way by other small businesses when the economy is being extra horrible to all of us right now. My co-owners are trying to find a new place, but coming up empty, because landlords are parasites making everything too expensive and it's really bad in this town. I don't have the fight in me for this when the country is... gestures at everything and I'm so busy fighting to just continue existing in peace. My regular customers are also queer and trans and poor and fighting the same fights, so they haven't been able to spend money in my shop. I've only had two months this year where I've broken even. I'm not the sort of person who is going to try to hard sell somebody to spend beyond their means. Ethical business practices are nearly impossible to do when our economy rewards lack of ethics so much more, but I don't want to become just another unethical business. I'd rather give it up. Last day is October 19. (The online store will be unaffected, and I've got new stuff for it soon.)

I'm lucky, though. I was able to immediately find another gig, working for my favorite company in the world, a very small local chain of cheese shops. You probably know that cheese is my favorite thing, and this company is such a dream, top to bottom. And W-2 income is something I vitally need in these unstable times. I feel so lucky that I get to work here and be paid well for it. But I also am one of the most experienced people in the company, even more so than my bosses, which means I've been working a lot to help open a new location. All while working a lot to try to smoothly close my art shop. 50 hour weeks and Fibromyalgia are not friends. My days have been wake up, work, go home and zone out until bedtime because I am in extreme pain, sleep, then do it all over. Most of what I've been posting over the past 5 months has been stuff I made five months ago. I am just now, as of this week, finally able to reduce my hours and take days off here and there and be able to spend some time working on my art.

As this has been going on, widespread internet censorship has been ramping up, and it's especially directed at queer and trans people. Non-sexual nudity used to be seen as different from sexual nudity in the art world (that's a whole essay that I'm not gonna get into right now), but that has changed. My SFW Patreon was classified as adult content and shadowbanned. I couldn't make new posts until I went through a whole verification process, which took a while. It's also been a big sign that I need to leave the platform. I can't be relying on that money only to have them finally kick me off without warning and leaving me without a significant chunk of my income. I would rather intentionally work on finding alternate ways of making money and ending my time with a business that is happy to take a % of my income while doing nothing for me. They don't defend my work or fight for its right to exist. They sabotage it and make it harder and harder because they are no longer artist-owned, and venture capitalists will always "comply in advance" if they think something might slightly affect their money.

I never really liked Patreon. I understand that doing something for a living requires more grunt work than doing it as a hobby, but even in the good ol' days when the Pamplemousse people were like "Oh yes, we encourage adult artists to use our platform!" it was hard to fit it into my workflow in a way that made sense. If you've been following me for a long time, you know I came up in the early 00s when webcomics would be free, and we made money through unobtrusive ads and a tip jar. I don't like putting my work behind a paywall, I really don't. Part of making art is communicating with other human beings, and I don't want to put up barriers that limit my communication with my audience rather than expanding it. I know we will never have that old version of the internet back, but I've been finding opportunities for reviving some of the Old Ways. I'll announce that once I have plans more solidified. (Part of why this whole thing took me so long to write was that I was waiting for everything to be ironed out, but it's just taking a while.)

It hasn't been all bad. My agent says there's been a lot of interest and requests for my latest manuscript, which is great. I've been having such a blast working on Magical Women and it makes me happy to sit in the chair and work on it. I'll be having a lot more time to work on it soon. Having a day job that pays me well gives me more freedom to make the art that I love, rather than what the algorithm demands, because if nobody likes it, oh well. Ironically, it's the art made with love that actually makes the most money. In a time when more and more people are playing it safe, I'm setting things up so I can be more dangerous than ever.

I'll still need to make some money from my art in order to afford life, but there will no longer be so much pressure on myself to try to make every piece of work into a Product To Be Consumed For Profit. It can just be art again. We can go back to communicating as artist and audience, rather than "content creator" and "a bunch of random people that the algorithm served this to, who look at it for three seconds before moving on." I want to provide catharsis and comfort in these terrible times, and I want to provide inspiration and energy and fighting spirit. I want to be an oasis in the desert. I began my career in a time when queer media was a rare and hard to find thing, and I am proud to have given so many people comfort and confidence in a world that told them otherwise. It is, no exaggeration, the greatest honor of my life. I want to keep doing that.

I'm going to try to get back to doing more regular updates as I work on shifting things over. I promise I'm not gonna shut everything down without warning, although the websites I rely on may end up doing that to me. Or the government. (Have you downloaded a VPN and/or Tor browser yet?) But I'm gonna do what I can to weather this storm.

Thanks for reading this far. ADHD can often put someone in a spiral of shame and avoidance when things go a little bit wrong, and admitting my screw ups and airing them out does a lot to alleviate that guilt and get unstuck from the cycle. I now have energy to do the things I need to do, and you will see more posts from me now. They just might be in different places from where they used to be.