Aaaaaand We're Back!

Hello from Michael's website take 3!  I know, it looks fairly, well, yeah.... that's what it looks like.  but the last one, while looking pretty damn nifty, wasn't very usable.  So!  We're back to this blank blog form.  Which is fine for the moment, but I'll be prettifying it in time.In the meantime,  Brood Parasites continues apace, and Deadzone: Infestation from Mantic Games (background and story by yours truly), has begun to reach backers.  The feedback and buzz has been fantastic, and has left me feeling very warm on the outside when I wake up to comments like this:

If you haven't read it (to change game systems a bit) the fiction in the Deadzone Infestation book is about my speed. It sets up the situation, explains what each faction is doing there and sets the stakes, but leaves the end of the story to the players. Some of the best game fluff I've read for a while, both in terms of quality and for doing its job as game fiction.

Always nice to know what you were aiming for hit the mark.OK so, onwards and upwards.  Brood will continue to be serialised, and I have some more stories being published later this year.  But first, let's get this wesbite sexy.....Michael

Lost in the Flood or hide Behind an Imaginary Paywall? - Or, 'Why Patreon May Not Be For You"

So Brood Parasites is off Patreon.  I gave it the good old college try, but in the end getting traffic there was just too hard.  There's the usual issue of just trying to get people interested in your work, bu in Patreon's case I believe another issue was the prevalence of dollar signs everywhere.  Well, that's Patreon's raison d'être; monetise art.  But in my case I wasn't trying to do that, just get people to read Brood.  I was offering it for free, but there will always be a kind of invisible barrier to most people who feel they should be paying for something, even if its being freely offered, and will avoid it.Or maybe not.That was another reason I feel I wasn't making any progress on Patreon was the complete lack of any traffic oversight.  I could have had thousands of people reading me (note - there's no way in hell this was happening), and I could never know.  The only way to track that was through paying backers, and, well, that wasn't my intention.  I felt a little icky asking for money for something which wasn't complete yet.So, I've moved the project to Wattpad.  Here there's no question the art isn't free, and tracking traffic is much easier.  However, not I'm very much underneath the flood.  There's a lot of writing there.  A.  Lot.  And the search function, while better than Patreon's is still very much slewed to already popular works.Still, I feel I'm further ahead of the game.  I've started at the beginning again, but we're already up to Chapter Fivem so come on down and re-read the beginning of the adventure.Michael