Ask Me Anything #6 - What Happened in 2017?

Q: Why did you shut down Bloomin' Faeries! without warning in 2017?

A: To give some context for those of you who weren't around at the time, back in 2017, I shut down bloomingfaeries.com without warning. At the same time, any and all content I had on other sites (whether social media, Smashwords, Amazon, etc.) was also deleted instantly. I gave no explanations at the time and let people believe what they would. Then a year later (late 2018/early 2019), I restarted everything.

In late 2016/early 2017, I'd been working on Bloomin' Faeries! for well over six years, and I was in a bit of a slump. I was growing tired of making the comics, felt like I was running out of ideas, and generally falling prey to a severe case of Impostor Syndrome. But I was soldiering on because for some reason, I was too stubborn to quit. I had a hundred or so very loyal members (this was pre-Patreon, when I was running a membership system off my website) that I didn't want to disappoint. The logistics of stopping the site also seemed daunting, so I took the path of least resistance: I kept things going as they were.

Then I took a sick day at work. Again, more context: I was working in a video game company that had among its clients companies like Disney, Nickelodeon, and a bunch of lesser-known (but still very kid-friendly) companies. The day after, the (female) co-owner of the company summoned me to her office, had me sit down, and dropped a simple sentence:

"We know about your website."

Since I own more than half a dozen websites, it took me a few seconds to do the math: she could only be talking about bloomingfaeries.com.  In my sickness, I hadn't realized it's called in sick using my bloomingfaeries.com address. She gave me a choice: take it down or be fired on the spot. The desire to keep my day job and my fatigue about producing the comic made the decision easy: I would shut down Bloomin' Faeries! I was given the day off to take care of it. That's what I did.

In hindsight, perhaps I could have fought back, pulled out my own big gun and claimed it was unlawful termination, or threaten to tell our clients about it. To paraphrase Harvey Spector from Suits (one of my favorite TV shows), "someone pulls a gun on you, you pull a bigger one, or take it away, or one of 146 other solutions." But I was very tired at the time and I didn't have much fight left in me.

So I chose the job, and it turned out to be a poor choice. One year after taking it, I was feeling underused, under appreciated, and underpaid. Worse yet, I was really missing the faeries and their mischief. But what I missed most was the interaction and appreciation I got from my members. It was one of those things, like you don't know what you've got until you lose it, and then you can't get it back. And in the early months of 2018, I had a chat with the company bosses and told them I wasn't happy at work. It was on the eve of a much-needed three-week vacation. I said I wasn't ready to quit, but I'd take my vacation time to think it over. I also asked them to see if they could have a more useful role for me within the company.

It was during that vacation that I decided to quit and start a fantasy writing project that was dear to my heart (and which I'd been developing for 2-3 years already). I had a nice pile of cash in the bank to support me while I did that, and if that didn't work out, I could easily get myself another job.

It was during that time that I figured, "hey, now I can restart BF." I so I rebooted the site, made a new comic, and polled my tiny remaining audience to see if there was an interest in rebooting the comic. I started an IndieGogo campaign, got enough funds to commission two comics, and started this Patreon page. And thanks to a group of loyal backers, I was able to successfully reboot it and make it what it is today.

So that's the story. It was work related and it was the result of general fatigue. The follow-up question was "why not just tell people that?" Mostly, because I'm a very private person in real life and I felt it was no one's business. In hindsight, it might not have been the public-at-large's business, but it certainly was my backers' business. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and coming clean about this has been weighing on my mind for a while. There's a fraction of you that were there at the time and who are still backers today. To that group, I have a simple message:

I apologize for letting you down and I thank you for sticking around.

--Jaycee

Next AMA: if you have questions you'd like me to answer in the next AMA, please write them in the comments below.