A Rather Large Announcment

1) my attachment didn't attach from last post so im re-attaching it here.

2) I am closing this Patreon.

There are a number of reasons behind this. Please stick around for story time.

I started writing for fun in 2012. I didn't make a lot of money back then. I had looked unsuccessfully for work for nearly a year before landing a pretty prestigious training program that paid the rent. I wrote for fun and posted to Saradas and Deviant Art. The internet was a little more Wild West in those days and sites were definitely less regulated. This was also at the tail end of the last gen of writers that got everyone through the 90s over on DTV, MAK's Geocities Page, or on Brawn.

I did gain a bit of notoriety in those days, enough that some users listed me among their favorite writers. Maybe Iceman is around somewhere, he was a pretty constant customer/user in those days and popped up often (come to think of it I haven't seen anything from him since pre-covid, if you're reading this, i hope you're doing well). However, what i should've been doing was working on my career, and in those days I worked a dead-end (and sometimes fun) job while writing and running an instagram account (girlswhoflex, its somehow still not been shut down after 10 years of inactivity) as a front to get free flexes.

At some point in 2017 my car was on its last legs. I got into a mediocre lease but a recent "promotion" gave me enough of a bump to cover. What I didn't realize was the cyclist i hit 8 months prior would spike my insurance to nearly $400, and i simply did not have that money. SO this patreon was born. Somehow, for two years, i managed to hang on until my record was clean again. That was still early days for me, and I was writing fairly often and still working that job.

Covid hit. Priorities changed. I switched jobs for something better right before the pandemic hit but took a hit to my health working graveyard shift. Found a better job a couple of years after that--but work from home was coming to and end. I always wondered if at my first job they were tracking my keystrokes--i wrote OFTEN at work in google docs because I had a lot of time on my hands. That was no longe rthe case, and i finally had real work to do. It's been 4 years since then and some of y'all have stuck around through a lot of inconsistency.

Some other things kind of happened a long the way. Some will remember DMs asking where stories had gone and my response that Patreon had locked my account because someone had reported a posting (even after I started hosting on drive) so i nuked everything. Some of you know that I had two stints as a mod over at GWM, where i now haven't logged in for over a year. Some of you know that Saradas doxxed me after I badmouthed them on the GWM boards and restored postings I had asked them to remove. None of you know that I got totally burnt out on writing and it stopped being fun as I got older. The last commission I worked on I simply could not finish, and refunded the cost of the story to the requestor. That maybe happened twice in the proceeding 13 years.

At some point I decided I wanted to make real steps in my career--I'm not getting any younger--but part of it was because I was watching not only my friends get past their younger years (good or bad times) and move on, but looking back on my old girlswhoflex IG page and seeing a lot of those women had changed and moved on too, and here I was with activities that looked the same ten years apart. i put my nose to the ground and worked on my job. Part of this is wanting to get out of the muscle world completely. I'm old enough now that I feel worse and worse the longer I participate in it. I dont' want to contribute to it any longer.

For most of the run the funds I earned here went to my car payment (which wasn't terrible to be honest, never more than 370/month)--maybe about 2 years ago is when i started to really fall off an da lot of you were rightly dissatisfied with my offerings. Not that it wouldn't help out but I am finally at a point where I can put this down (god willing and I suddenly don't find myself unemployed, but then the patreon wouldn't make much of a dent anyway in that case).

For about a day i really though Ai would help me kind of get it together but then i realized that a) there aren't that many of you left b) i have no avenues to advertise my stories and c) why would people read stories when they can try and prompt AI to get what they're looking for.

In a small kind of "twist", i guess, y'all's responses over the years have given me a little confidence to write short stories in other arenas. Well--the IDEA of writing them, since I haven't explored this yet.

Anyways. I have nothing outstanding, and nothing up coming. This is a bit of a fair warning to download anything youd like to keep, after which I'll be clearing my google drive and closing that gmail account, and of course this account.

I am eternally grateful for y'alls support over the years. You got the short (lol) version there but during the worst of it those years felt so difficult and having your enthusiasm and support (obviously financially) meant a lot. I hope if there's still stuff that you like that you're able to keep it. Obviously if something I previously wrote is gone it is legit GONE.

Some fun stats to close:

• If i'm reading my stats correctly i've had 444 paid members over the years but had nearly double that in sign ups so a lot of sign ups and canceling over the years. you can see the rise and fall with holiday cycles and where I might have been posting over on DA

• Of those 444 I can only message 387 of them, which either means the accounts are deactivated or they were purged by patreon? i'm not sure.

• i currently have 16 active accounts. I think at my peak i had 52 active subscribers. I do have 120 active members lurking around who i know pop in from time to time to dip into the paid posts. i kept 50+ for about 16 months straight.

• I received 6 pages of exit surveys, anything from "no answer" to "my situation changed" or " i got what i came for" or "i paid and didn't get what was promised". I feel like this should've been used more.

• I used to charge $5 a month but you can see EXACTLY when insurance renewal came up because I changed the sub fee to $10. I did offer a second tier for a while but that backfired

• I blocked 14 users. I have no remembrance of the reasons

• Shockingly, my total earnings since 2018 is just over $40k (47k prior to Patreons take). Heavily leaning towards those early years (2018 and 2019 were both over 7k each and later years hovered from mid 4000s to low 5000s).

• in my insights graph there is a flat line at 0 for free members until 2022 when it shot up, as paid declined.

• i had 51k visits to my page over its life until this posting. The vast bulk of them were direct traffic (entering the url directly into the bar or having a bookmark saved) but other sourced include: email (16k), google (9.4k), Onlyfans (1), likely from Angie Yeo posting about me, Deviant art (260)

• my first sign up was...Iceman/Jeremy Wilson on 8/6/2014, he's still a paying subscriber. (again, I hope you're well).

• the largest contributor, which likely means that he has never canceled, was HoosierDaddy with $1562 lifetime contribution

I have no idea how many stories I've written, or how many pages, or how many words. But it was fun.

I will set everything to no tiers and hopefully all that does is make every posting free.

Thank you everyone :)