Hi all. As you can probably tell, I don’t have anything new ready yet; as I haven’t really had the time/energy to work on this stuff yet – this summer was just a fucking mess, and I am still having issues even trying to recover from it. However, I am going ahead with this announcement about tossing out my old schedule entirely – not quite sure of the exact details/plans of how I will proceed from this point forward yet… but that is also kind of the point.

First though – an “update” on the Patreon situation… there really isn’t one, because they have yet to get back to me after my latest reply last week. I think that my reply to their reply maybe got flagged as spam or something, since I never got one of their automated responses indicating that they even got it – so I sent another one two days ago, that has at least been acknowledged, as of yesterday… but not replied to. (I waited to post this until today, hoping they might reply yesterday, but… nope.) Knowing my luck, they will reply just after I post all these updates… but fuck it – I will deal with that later. I effectively know what the “best” and worst case scenarios are already; I just need to find out which is going to be forced upon me, since I refuse to endanger myself with their retarded forced identification crap for $20 a month.

Anyway, as mentioned above, I am totally getting rid of my old schedule, as things have basically only gotten worse this year, and I have had issues even keeping up with a mini-set every other month since the summer got into full swing and the shit hit the fan. What this means is that I am effectively adopting the schedule that most artists seem to have, which is that I will do whatever I can, whenever I can… which will hopefully lead to more/better content in the long term, once I recover from the past few months. (Hell, some of the highest income artists I have seen basically make just one image a month.) I have not exactly been able to try and actually rest/recover much yet though, due to real life crap that has been going on and the assorted messes related to the Patreon fiasco that is making this so much worse for me. (I also have to deal with the constant guilt/anxiety of not being able to get anything much done for this project in a few months now… but thinking about all that just makes it even worse still.)

I am not exactly abandoning the “mini” set idea either – those will likely just be very infrequent now. (Maybe for like holidays, or ideas I particularly like that don’t fit the main story arc… I dunno.) Originally, the plan with the mini-sets was for them to stay small (the first few were under a dozen renders) and it was mostly just a gimmick to get myself to constantly be making new stuff and trying new things with renders. However once I actually got good at making renders/scenes, they got really big and complicated, and that left me no time/energy to work on “main” content… which which is at least partially the reason why things are where they are today. It is worth noting though, that most of the reason my renders are as nice as they are now is due to the mini-sets… so it was definitely not a waste. (Not that things were really much better support-wise back when I was still doing the main sets or other stuff… but still.)

In the immediate term, I have no idea when I will get back to working on LITC 6, but at this moment, I am trying to get enough energy/motivation back just to do the October/Halloween side render stuff that I do every year in a couple weeks. I have no idea why that is/has been a thing, but I do want to keep that up if I can… so we will see what happens. The other thing some long-time fans may have been expecting around now is effectively delayed until after LITC 6… so again, no clues on that yet either.

As for the Patreon thing, it will likely either become just a tip jar, if I am forced to wipe the NSFW stuff from it; or effectively a tip jar with some tiered bonuses – as it kind of has been for a few months now. (I don’t yet know what I will/can do with my “regular” content if my NSFW Patreon has to be taken down… but that is a mess for another day.) This is of course presuming that I am able to keep my page up at all… but as far as I can tell now, that should at least be possible if I re-classify it – I hope.

I should be back in a few days to go over the polls, and/or post a more official update on the Patreon situation… if/when they ever get back to me. (Kind of hoping that I don’t have to redo my entire page and wipe all NSFW posts manually… but if that is my only option, so be it.) Other than that, I have no idea when anything else will get done – I really, really need to take a significant amount of time off to just recover, and nothing else. Aiming for Halloween side renders at the minimum in the next month… but we will see what happens. We have the remnants of a hurricane coming this way in the next few days… so things will likely be messy as it is; but hopefully it won’t be too bad.

Again, please vote in the polls on the right if you haven’t yet done so; they really do help.

To conclude, if there is any chance anyone out there would actually like to help support me and/or my work on all sorts of new content; and/or get access to one of my latest/best mini-sets, (this month gets a choice of any mini-set of choice for the middle $15 tier, and I currently plan to just have it remain like that for what little time my current Patreon page likely has left) like the remaining finished story sets, and larger versions of the completed animations I have made/posted, and/or the full games I have also made, (the micro VN and Salune’s Slave Training are still available via my Patreon page; not sure what else may come in the future at this point…) check out my Patreon page!: https://www.patreon.com/redleatherart

Any interest, comments, follows, likes, votes, or support really does help. It is hard to keep making new stuff when nobody seems to care. Following me on DA/slushe/pixiv/twitter/whatever doesn’t cost anything – and that all does help spread the word about my work… so please consider doing some of that if you haven’t already.