Writer/Artist

Just a friendly creative otter fur with a passion for art, videogames, and stories.

If you like my work, please consider supporting me via Patreon: www.patreon.com/danielcaaron

Thanks and have a great day!

Hey all!

This is kind of a follow up to my last journal entry, which I recognize some of you may not have read yet. If you want to read that first, go ahead and do so. I think I may need to have a selected place for blogging and online journal posts. I’m writing a little bit more stuff lately and I think that journal entries get overlooked on furry art sites. I know I’m bad about keeping up with what journal entries those I follow post. Maybe any frustration I feel about my own entries or simply a writer’s desire to be read, I don’t know.

Anyway, on to the main topic at hand, which will mainly be related as I said above to following up on my previous journal entry, which was about my Patreon page, but also I think I may end up talking about a few other things.

So I posted last night about maybe writing stories exclusively published on Patreon, but now I don’t really feel I want to do things quite that way. Not charging by chapter at least, maybe doing it by month, or not making the chapters and content I post exclusive to Patreon.

This is in part at least because I was introduced to a book last night, Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, by Cory Doctorow, which is all about basically being an artist or writer or creative person in the age of internet and piracy and copying, and really got the gears in my head turning. I found out about the book by listening to the audiobook for Neil Gaiman’s The View From The Cheap Seats which among other things includes his introductions to various books, including the one by Cory Doctorow, mentioned above and to which I am referring currently. The book also includes an introduction by Amanda Palmer, where she talks about her time as a street performer, and about the response of fans later to the Dresden Dolls, where people who had pirated or otherwise ‘illegally downloaded’ their album when they had difficulty obtaining a copy later on would give money directly to the band as a way of apologizing and finally being able to pay for the music that the band had made and that they had loved. I read those introductions, and the first part of the book, about creating stuff no mater what out of a need and desire to create and share your creations with the world, and got me thinking of things I’d thought before.

Mainly it got me thinking of how difficult it had been for me in the past, in the first place to make money off my art, though not impossible and I have made a bit here and there, if only through the generous support of friends who enjoy my work, but also a feeling that at the end of the day I don’t really want to charge people for my work. I want to give it away freely, sure, I’d like to make money off of it, but even there, I want to make money off of it so I can ultimately be able to spend more time making more content for people to enjoy, giving me money in support of the works as a way of saying thank you and telling me that they enjoyed my work.

If I think honestly about it, sometimes a comment in celebration or appreciation for my work is almost worth more to me than money will ever be. I certainly hope my words and art and stories will live on past me, and after I’m gone it certainly won’t matter how much money I made off of the work, but, that said, I would love to just be able to write and draw and tell stories, but we’ll see if and when that happens.

On that note though, I think what I’d like to do or may do is still the idea of chapter installments, though I may set my Patreon pledges to charge on a monthly basis. The chapters will be free and available in multiple locations, but then I can maybe give perks to my Patreon supporters in the form of perhaps all the chapters of a story collected into a single volume collected together and given to my patrons as an ebook or pdf file, maybe with additional things in them like sketches I drew that either inspired the story or were inspired by the story, or a previously unpublished introduction, or something similar. If any one has any helpful ideas or know exactly what they would like to see from me, or what would make them contribute to a Patreon account from me that featured my stories, please, by all means, let me know.

As a quick note on the idea of doing comics. I said I’d add it possibly to my Patreon, and maybe I shall, under this new model of doing things, but I don’t quite feel confident in doing comics, having not really done them before, and I wanted to do, initially, earlier last year when I began a little work on Buckthorn, wanting to kind of have maybe a large portion or all of the story all drawn up and everything before posting any thing, but I may do things one page at a time, if only to make sure I really will enjoy doing comics. I feel more likely I’ll instead want to write out my stories in prose form, and create complimentary illustrations to go along with those stories, pretty much the way I have been doing.

I think like the chapter installments I may be doing will be, and they may possibly alternate, or I may do one story at a time, or two at max, Buckthorn (for trying my hand at making a comic), and my ‘Dragon Kingdoms’ story, ‘Alex Vulpineer’ story (which I’m calling ’The Rose Fox’ as an alternate title), and/or doing installments of one or both of two story ideas I may make basically my first furry novel: Wren Lake or Neptune.

One other thing to mention, as it seems to go on the surface a little against the idea of sharing freely my work, I’m creating and submitting stories for potential publication, to paid markets. Though, the amount for those won’t be a great amount, and it comes out of more a desire to see my name published. These are mostly short story anthologies, and those I may continue to write stuff for, that is, submitting short stories for publication by external publishers, but a lot of my longer stories and various other writings I intend to self-publish or share freely, again trying to leave the option open, through Patreon or other means, to show their appreciation, if they wish to, through monetary donations in support of my work.

That pretty much wraps everything up. I have work to do now, various things, implementing ideas into practice and writing and all these things. At the end of the day I am very grateful for all the watchers I have, which is a decent number overall, and I’m happy I can bring a little light into the world and make people happy through my creativity and hard work, and hope I continue to do so for a long time to come.

Thanks For Watching!
~Daniel C. Aaron (aka “Rale the Otter”)