Earlier this year I started a Patreon as an experiment. The logic was that I like writing and I like getting paid, and I wanted to see if I could get these two great flavours to combine.

Long story short, I didn’t.

I set a goal for $500/month by the end of the year or I’d shut it down. It’s now obvious that I’m not going to get anywhere close to that, and I’m a big believer in stopping when you know failure is inevitable rather than actually waiting to fail.

But also, I’m finding that I’m not doing a good job at managing it (apologies to all my patrons. this is entirely my fault), and that it makes me feel worse about the process of writing. A lot of this is because I find it weirdly stressful, which is nobody’s fault but mine but also not something I can do much about.

So the result is a system that stresses me out and is probably going to earn me less than one day’s worth of work over the course of the year. This is is a bad deal any way you look at it.

So I’m going to stop. No hard feelings on my part, it’s just an experiment that didn’t work out. If anything, I’m extremely grateful to all of the people who supported me along the way. I apologise to any of you who are disappointed by this.

I’ll keep blogging here, obviously, but I’m going to put the rate back down to probably more in the region of 1/week (at least, that’s what I’m going to set the Beeminder goal back to).

I will leave the Patreon page up for one week to give people time to see this on the feed as well and grab anything they want from the private archives, but will then close it before anyone is billed for this month.