A lot of people have been asking me about Wars of Infinity: When it’s going to be out, what its status is, why I’m working on this unrelated other project I can’t talk about instead of it. The answer to the first two questions is that I have no idea when it’s going to be out because I’ve only done the most basic preliminary outlining on it so far. The reason why I haven’t gotten to work on it is similarly simple:

I can’t afford to.

I don’t like talking about money, especially in public – I guess that makes me kind of like a Tierran aristocrat – but I can give you all at least some basic facts:

First of all: on a typical month, the sales from my entire catalogue gives me enough royalties to pay maybe 80-90% of my rent. For obvious reasons, that’s not enough to live off of. The fact that I already live in a one-bedroom rent-controlled apartment also means that finding a cheaper place is out of the question too – there aren’t exactly any cheaper places to be had. That means the remainder of my rent, as well as the cost of utilities, clothing, essential services, and food (because I like not starving to death) is left as a gaping hole in my finances.

My Patreon usually covers most of this – but not all of it. I understand that some other Choicescript authors have Patreons that bring in a lot more money than mine do, but they manage that by doing things like gating their WIP builds and Q&As and general fan interaction behind paywalls, while I prefer to keep these things free. Since I don’t want to enshittify the experience of being in my fanbase by monetising those things, I don’t make as much off my Patreon as I probably could, which also means that at the end of a typical month, I’m usually still a couple hundred dollars in the red.

That shortfall is then made up for by dipping into my savings. Lords of Infinity made me more money from a single title than anything else I’ve ever written – but it also took me four years to write. By the end of that process, I was almost broke despite cutting back on basically every expense I had. That’s not an experience I want to repeat again. If Wars of Infinity takes another four years to write (and it might), then that’s exactly the kind of problem I’ll be facing again.

This is why I’ve been working on an unrelated project this past year, instead of Wars of Infinity – because while it is unrelated to anything in the Dragoon Saga or the Infinite Sea setting, it does come with an advance big enough to tide me through the time I’ll have to spend writing it, as well as the likelihood that it’ll sell well enough to give me the financial reserve I’d need to spend the next few years after that working on Wars of Infinity, which will come with no advance, and no promise of sales big enough to recoup those costs.

I don’t like the fact that I have to interrupt work on my passion project (which the Dragoon Saga is) to make ends meet. While I am very proud of what I’m working on now, and I’d like to be remembered for it when it comes out, it’s very much outside of a lot of my zones of expertise and comfort. That being said, the reality is that I need money to live, and until the day that I can be guaranteed enough money either in the bank, or coming in every month to write whatever I want, whenever I want, I’m subject to the whims of the market, the publishing industry, and the general experience of actually being a responsible adult – and those forces mean that I can’t afford to commit nearly half a decade to a passion project when it means I will be essentially living on something around 90% of minimum wage for that whole time.

So how much money would I need to be able to write whatever I want, whenever I wanted? That’s a tough question to answer – because if nothing else, there’s a lot of things I’d like to be able to afford which I can’t right now – but at the bare minimum, I’d have to have either my sales income or my Patreon income double before I would even be comfortable committing to a project like Wars of Infinity. The project I’m working on now might help me get to that income level, as might some of the side projects I’m still working on – but until I actually get those projects released, I won’t know for sure.

Until then, I am still toeing the precipice which looms over the pit of the “starving artist”, and Wars of Infinity remains an outline.