Hello everyone! We haven’t caught up in a spell, have we? Happy New Year!! This is going to be a long post. I’m not sure if it was noticeable to the larger audience, but 2022 was a tough year for me. Every year is filled with new experiences that test our time, ability, and patience, and there hasn’t been any shortage of life-changing milestones for me in the past several years. But 2022 may take my personal cake so far. Attempting to make a long story short, approximately 10 years ago I went through the toughest breakup of my life, with a person I had known for almost a decade prior to that. That event took me many long years to truly get over, I think maybe ~3 years ago is when I finally felt like I had surpassed it inside and out. Well, approximately a year ago, I underwent another breakup. Although the magnitude of the relationship was no where near close to the prior, something about it triggered very similar feelings and dropped my mental health to an all-time low. Realizing that this indicated a problem with me and how I saw myself and the world around me, I began therapy to help rebuild my mental foundation and to help me understand myself better. Of course it’s all still a work in progress, but I would like to believe that I’ve made a ton of progress since then and am hopeful for a mentally fruitful 2023. This year-long dip has tanked my writing, I remember I couldn’t even open a word document all throughout summer. And while writing inspiration and motivation will always continue to ebb and flow, I feel like I’m starting to get back on the horse again. The next“TG” post will be #200 and there is something a lil special just like with TG 100. :) So what else is new? To celebrate mental health, the upcoming TG 200, and the new year 2023, a few changes are going to occur. Firstly, watermarks. I’ve been posting captions for over a decade at this point and liked to believe that I didn’t need watermarks, that people wouldn’t blatantly repost my captions without permission. This was naïve. Awhile back I did start including a faint“inkyleaf” on the images, but it was small and low effort. Going forward, all captions will have a distinct watermark that I’ve designed over a little while that will hopefully strike you as stylish and act as a seal of quality while also not being too distracting. :) Second, tags! I know a few people have asked me include more comprehensive tags on my posts to find“archetypes” of stories easier. At this point, including Quickies, over 300 captions/stories have been written, and sifting through them on Tumblr is a pain in the ass. I’m going to be totally honest and this is going to make me sound like a doofus - I didn’t really realize how tags worked on sites like Tumblr/Blogger until I started perusing Blogger a bit more in the past year, and tags are so helpful. My understanding of tags came from YouTube’s early days, where people would think of as many tags as possible solely to earn searches and clicks. Although this may still be true (honestly I don’t even know at this point lmao), it’s not worth it over having a nice comprehensive library of categories to choose from. Now, here’s where these two will combine. Over the course of the next year (or two, it could take awhile), I’m going to be posting all of my captions and stories onto Blogger with appropriate tags and will retroactively be fixing the tags on Tumblr to match. On Blogger, I will also be updating the captions with the new watermark! Hopefully this will make my stuff more accessible to more people while also making older stories easier to find and revisit. :) Now, here is where I may make some people unhappy, which I apologize for in advance. I started writing captions and stories for patrons on Patreon many years ago, and I’m so thankful for everyone’s pledges! However, as years have passed, my captions and stories have become longer and better. As a result - and to do something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile - I’m going to slightly increase the prices of the $7.50 and $11.50 caption tiers to $10 and $15 respectively. The $1 and $20 tiers will remain unaffected, and all prior payments of 7.50 and 11.50 will remain in tact, no one is losing any requests or anything! This is just for going forward. :) Since I cannot edit payments of tiers while people are pledged, these tiers will be replaced with the new ones, and all patrons will be notified thru Patreon. Going forward, I’m also going to be a little more picky with what I chose to write. When I began Patreon, I thought it would be a good idea to expose myself to more ideas from the TGTF world and what people wanted to read. While I was successful in this, I didn’t realize quite how deep and different the rabbit hole could get, and honestly everything is just not for me. Of course I would never shame what anyone is into (how could I write these stories otherwise?), but some topics/themes have come up that took a long time for me to write solely because I just wasn’t super into it, which isn’t being fair to either myself or the patron. I’ll still try to be accommodating and try new things from time to time, just within my own boundaries. I hope everyone understands! ^^; And of course always feel free to ask! I think that about wraps this up, don’t think I’m forgetting anything. :) Thank you all for reading this and my stories over the years, I’m not sure if I’d still be doing this without you guys. Let’s make 2023 the best year yet! :D
See Also
The Mira Life Project