We’re five years old! I’m abandoning you now! Bye-bye!

Okay, obviously I’m not. I can’t promise you I won’t ever, but it’s my intention to keep working on Tin Soldier for at least the next year. The regular updates that push the plot forward are going to stop for a while, and a rerun with editing and improved illustrations will be available at Pillowfort and DeviantArt (Late edit: That did not work out. DeviantArt is a spam engine, and they began giving their contributors’ work to AI art thieves, so to hell with them. And Pillowfort, alas, seems pretty dead) — and here, but more quietly. There will also be some extras, as a temptation for old readers to hang on and be patient with me.

I’m essentially a one-person operation right now. Audience issues aside, I don’t have time to keep up with my schedule and do all the stuff I want/need to do. To finish the illustrations alone, if I want to be done in a year, I need to do three of those a week. As of writing this, I have an issue with my shoulder which has been causing me pain for four months (Late edit: After over a year, it still hurts, but it’s finally getting a little better) and making it difficult for me to type and draw. I probably need to take a break for a while and let that sucker rest. If I want to be back in a year with more story, I will be going like a bat out of hell for most of my “break,” and even then, I might need more time.

So I’m not abandoning you. But I have to drop some things for a while and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Or if. I have a lot of health stuff going on, I’m not gonna guarantee you something mental or physical won’t go kerflooey and stop me from doing what I want to do; it has happened before. (Late edit: Yes, and it happened again.)

There are also various technological issues that need fixing. Stuff on this site is broken right now and more things will break. Forever. (Late edit: But now I have this new site that at least won’t have the same firewall problem!) My ability to fix these things is often limited by circumstances beyond my control, as well as my own incompetence. If I ever get Tin Soldier to the point where I can make server issues and coding somebody else’s problem, I will do that so fast it’ll make your head spin. In the meantime, even though I’m trying to keep an eye on this place and keep it functional, it may not be accessible or working in the future. You can get hold of me at tinsoldier.space@gmail.com (Late edit: I got rid of the .space site, so I’ll need to update that email to something that makes sense) with any issues, and I will try to address them eventually.

If you have come to this frustrating message because you like what I’m doing, and now you have to deal with there being no more story for a year or more, I am sorry. I hope you’re not too mad or too shy to leave me a message here or somewhere and let me know you like this stuff. Please. I need your help to stay motivated and strong, otherwise I won’t. I do want to give you more story, but what’s free for you to read isn’t free for me to create. It costs time, effort and materials. Please help me balance my books by telling me if what I’m doing is worth something.

If you’re able to support me at the Patreon, or by advertising/advocating for me, that’s great! Please hit up the Support page (Late edit: Patreon pissed me off. I have a Ko-Fi now!) and see if I’ve produced any updates to make that a little easier. And the store may or may not be working when you check it out, but there’s stuff in it! (Late edit: the store it at Ko-Fi too! Now I don’t need to mess around with your credit card information!)

I suppose, after five years, I should use some of this space to reflect and comment on my work. But, given the need for extras, I’m going to be doing that a lot. Let me just say it’s been hard, it’s been fun, and it’s been surreal. I hope I’ve given you something you needed.

Be well, and I’ll be around.

———

Well, it’s February 2023, I’m almost through my planned “year off” and, oh, boy, my broken body has stolen a lot of the time I wanted to spend on Tin Soldier (and Soldier On!) I’ve done a lot, but I have a lot more to do, so I’m not ready to give you more story on a regular schedule yet. I’m eyeing a return to form later in the year, maybe in October, but no matter what I’m able to give you on April 9th, it won’t be as much as I want, and any further content will appear randomly for a while.

I did finally figure out my firewall problem, which is why you’re reading this on a new site. Some ISPs firewall cheap domains like .xyz and .space entirely, because they’re popular with spammers. So I paid for a .com through a new host. Given the nature of my writing, I may hop to yet another new host when my introductory year is over with this one. I’m worried about having the plug yanked on my site for being “obscene,” and the language in the TOS for my current host gives them enough leeway to kick me off whenever they want.

I’m going to keep donating to charities during this between-time, but my health issues have caused me to reorder my priorities. Basically, I’ve lived through a health situation which did not stop me from writing entirely, but made illustrating impossible, and running a website or a social media account too labour-intensive to handle. I can’t guarantee you it won’t happen again. I was born damaged, and doctors can (and do!) take one look at me and think, “Aha! An obese woman! Well, she needs to get thin and stop being all hysterical. No further intervention required!” Even leaving aside the turmoil the Canadian health care system is experiencing, I’m not going to get good health care. Ever. So if I don’t start doing capitalism well enough to hire help at a fair wage, I may not be able to keep sharing my work with you. That feels like a DEFCON 1 level emergency to me!

Healthwise, I have managed to cobble together some improvement. I stumbled over a health group that seems to collectively have some idea what to do about my shoulder pain, and my shoulder does not hurt all the time anymore. I am hopeful that — with more hard work, needles and electricity — I may get to the point where my shoulder does not hurt at all. And I managed to get a definitive diagnosis on eye problems that have plagued me all my life, which recently got so bad that I could barely draw.

My left eye was slightly misaligned — not enough to look obvious, but enough that my brain compensates by favouring one eye or the other and never quite knitting together the information from both. After two months of nausea-inducing exercises, I have managed to get my eyes to line up within normal parameters, but my brain still doesn’t know how to integrate the information from both. It’s been compensating for over forty years, so I’m not sure how quickly that’s gonna improve, but the eye doctor was astounded I managed to straighten my eye out so fast, so I am doing better than expected.

There are no guarantees here. I don’t know how much better I’ll get, or if I’ll stay better, or when the next thing will go wrong. In my current situation, Ragnarök — defined as a day I cannot give you any more story without help — will end this story. So, apart from all this other stuff I’m doing, I’ve got to Ragnarok-proof TS and SO. It needs to turn enough of a profit that it pays for itself, and so I can compensate at least one helper. Then I need to find a talented person who’s willing to put up with me and train them to help me tell this story and run this site. Right now, that ain’t happening, so my continued support of charities doesn’t make the situation any worse. When it gets to the point where I am making any profit at all, I have to reevaluate where the money goes. With no profit, we stay balanced on a razor’s edge indefinitely.

I’ve tried advertising in the past, and I’ve been incompetent, but there are some new opportunities I’ll take advantage of once the site functions a bit better. Tumblr and WordPress have united in their attempt to earn ad money by offering to Blaze posts by small creators. As long as I retain my ability to create images, I can advertise that way. I also — due to spending a long time physically incapacitated — got even more deeply into BreadTube this last year. ThoughtSlime, whom I love, offers free advertising to small leftist projects in the Eyeball Zone. Tin Soldier is rather daunting in size, but I am certainly a small creator, and I intend to start a side project which should be very BreadTube-friendly, if my progressive senpais should ever notice me.

Writing has been the least-difficult thing for me this last year, but my anxiety-laden brain has preferred to work on a huge upcoming drama, instead of the slightly smaller ones I need to write FIRST. As well as writing plot points I won’t get to for literal, real-time years, I’ve also been working on a manifesto for a prospective artistic movement. Corporatism, capitalism and copyright are strangling our ability to tell stories, have fun, and survive, so I want to puke my emotions into a coherent statement and plan of action. I’m calling it No Kings, Only Fooles (hopefully the variant spelling will make it easier to search). It’ll go up on the site in some form once I’ve written it and added citations, but I want to illustrate it too. When I have that up, I’ll notify the Eyeball Zone. +/-25 pages is a lot less to ask poor Mildred to read than +/- 2000.

So Pillowfort and DeviantArt didn’t work out. Tumblr may, especially in light of the great Twitter exodus, but their interface is terrible for long works. If I ever have the energy to do Tumblr for real, it’ll be mostly art, short extras, and ads. If I still want to do a rewind, I’m leaning towards using Substack as a platform. They’re not perfect, and they’re certainly not going to bother to advertise me, but they’re an offsite newsletter service with a simple interface, and they probably won’t censor me. Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know if TS or SO wind up anywhere offsite.

I have finished the De Merde Edit, and the new Text-Only versions of Tin Soldier. I will put together a store onsite, with everything available at name-your-price, once I get my darn Canadian bank account. I will need to get a new PayPal when that happens, and I don’t know what that’ll do to my Patreon. I’m not doing any complicated financial manoeuvring until I update my bank info. (As you can see, I’m already working on updating my spelling.)

As a result of the new formatting, Milo’s cards do not display properly on mobile, but they are legible, they remain so in dark mode, and in this format (headings over a transparent image) they can be consumed in various other weird formats and still be understood as text. So far, that’s the best I can do for the poor guy, but I’ll see what future updates allow me to put together.

I did go full Canadian for the De Merde Edit, at least I tried to. It’s very hard to find a guide that will correct my US spelling to Canadian without overcorrecting it all the way to the UK. Google Docs itself does not have a Canadian option. The spelling and grammar plug-in I found that kinda does is a paid service, which I’m willing to put up with for now, but it overcorrects a lot of other stuff. I want to call this the final edit and just leave everything, typos included, frozen in time, so I can focus on the new stuff. However, there may be some totally incoherent mistakes that I’ve somehow missed. If so, they’ll get corrected on the site, and I dunno what I’ll do with the books yet. It’s very difficult to correct, format and re-upload that many files.

Culturally, I’m sure I’ve also screwed up and left offensive material in some places. Most of the time, I think I’m aware of choices I made that might hurt others, and I’ll try to add some commentary so folks at least know why. But time marches on, and there will be more and more vintage 2017–22 errors that become evident in the future. I can’t keep editing forever, and some of this stuff needs to stay how it is for plot reasons.

I’m gearing up to show you a lot more Big World stuff, I hope like hell I can handle it, and I also hope I’ll have a chance to shoehorn in some stuff that Hyacinth’s little household could not be expected to know, even with Erik and Barnaby in it. I don’t think what you’ve seen of their world history is inconsistent with awful things going on that the average person doesn’t know about — just like real life! — and you’ve already seen Marsellia tends to whitewash whatever they’re ashamed of.

I’m trying so hard to cultivate excitement for the near future, but I’ve always been like the Fool in the tarot deck, focused on the bright distance and about to wander right off a cliff. I’m super eager for what the far future will bring to the plot, including Klara Marie Hoffmann and her ballet-themed terrorist organization, and my new favourite queer couple.

Okay, yes, I know Our Flag Means Death is gonna come out with Season 2 soon. I’m leaving room at the top for Ed and Stede, and Jim and Oluwande! I’m also leaving room for Coffee and Tea, I haven’t played much with them yet, and Hyacinth and… Well, you’ll see. Two was an arc number for Tin Soldier — for a good reason, you’ll find that out later too — but for Soldier On, we’re going on beyond binary. Just at the moment, I love my favourite couple to the point of distraction, and you’ll probably see a lot of them in a few years — after the slooowest of burns!

I still have lots of stories to tell you. I just need to spend a frustrating amount of time polishing this place up so I’m shiny enough to attract some new friends to read with you. If my health holds up (big if!), Year 13 will begin for real in October, and you’ll have a short taste of it beginning April 9th, even if there’ll be a long wait for the rest.

Thanks for your continued patience, and I hope I can get back to you soon.