T-5
Right. I’ll have the end of Last War in Albion Volume 3 out later in the week—I haven’t had time to typeset it since getting back from ten days in the UK, and anyway, I want to do this first.
Right now we’re just under $300 a month away from my review of The Star Beast being public. Will we make it by Saturday? Will the review just go public Sunday morning when a bunch of people discover it’s paywalled and join? Will I just fail to get my Patreon back up to where I need it to be? We’ll all find out together over the next few days! But if you want to see my thoughts on the return of Russell T Davies, right now the way to do it is to back my Patreon at any level.
As for podcasts, well… let’s change that goal a bit. Because, frankly, I don’t want to not do the podcasts. I have too good a guest list to not do the podcasts. So those are happening, and are Patreon exclusive until the Patreon hits $3300. And just to whet the appetite/spur some subscriptions, I’ll go ahead and announce the guest list. This time around instead of having one guest per special I decided to go all out and have two people on for each one.
For The Star Beast I figured that, since it’s a comics adaptation, I should get some other Doctor Who fan comics critics. So how about Sean Dillon and Ritesh Babu? Yeah, I thought that’d do.
Knowing so little about Wild Blue Yonder made picking guests harder, so I decided to keep it in the family. Joining me for what is, bizarrely, her first Eruditorum Presscast ever it’ll be Christine Kelley. And because the classics are classics for a reason we’ve got Jack Graham, who proclaims himself to be dreading watching this shit and says it’ll be Extremis all over again.
And as for The Giggle? Kate Orman and Jon Blum.
Meanwhile, I thought I should probably offer a roundup of some of what’s already up on the Patreon. First off, I reviewed all six episodes of Tales of the TARDIS.
That’s a bit ephemeral, ultimately. But I’ve also just put up the TARDIS Eruditorum entry for Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children, which is, if I may be so bold, a banger. (The entry, I mean.) That means that I’ve got all of the first two Whittaker seasons covered. The first season’s even up in a nice ebook, and I’ll go through and tag the second one to make that easier for everyone to find.
Speaking of ebooks, I’ll be shipping out the Kickstarter orders for TARDIS Eruditorum v8 this week. And as soon as I do, all Patrons will be getting the ebook of it. And the $50+ tier will be getting print copies.
Perhaps $50 a month is rich for your blood. I understand. But one of the best ways to get these reviews public is to look at the higher tiers, so maybe you’d consider $25 a month, which gets you writers notes and other such things. I’ll be writing one up on Queen Shit soon, but for now everyone on that tier can enjoy two playlists I made for the drives to and from the airport for the UK trip, along with commentaries on their construction. An oddity, to be sure, but a genuinely fun one—I really enjoy these playlists, and the style of playlist they represent.
And then there’s good old $10 a month, which gets you a bunch of reviews of media I consume. Including, most recently, a review by Penn of the Old Vic’s current production of A Christmas Carol starring Christopher Eccleston. And I’ll be doing some more of those review posts over the next few weeks.
You’ve also got all seven volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum, Last War in Albion, Neoreaction a Basilisk, and the first five issues of Britain a Prophecy. All of it up there for just $5 a month.
All right. That’s the crass marketing approach. But I want to make the personal approach too. For a long time now—nearing a decade—I’ve managed to live my life on a pretty simple principle: make stuff I think is cool, post it on the Internet, and people will support it enough to call it a living. It’s a good arrangement.
And a key part of that is “post it on the Internet.” For most of my career, I’ve tried to avoid paywalling anything too substantial. I recognize the appeal of exclusivity as a sales tactic, but… I dunno. A lot of my readers are broke queer kids. I don’t want to tell someone who’s struggling to secure housing or food that they can’t read my take on The Star Beast without ponying up $5 a month. At the end of the day, I’m an idealistic anarchist from the olden Internet—an “information wants to be free” kinda girl who thinks community support is the best way to do things.
But it’s hard out there right now. With social media imploding and my Patreon having taken a major hit… I don’t really know how best to pull this off. I know what I want the answer to be. I’d love to get back to using this site regularly and having everything just be out there. But maybe the only way to do it these days is with exclusivity and paywalls. I dunno. At the end of the day, I need to pay rent every month, and I’m gonna do what makes that possible.
But in a world where a lot of things are getting shittier by the day, I’d really love to hold on to this one.
So if you possibly can, please help this site and this community continue doing what it’s been doing for over a decade—being, for my money, the single best place on the Internet to discuss Doctor Who.
Here’s the Patreon link again. Hopefully I’ll see you Saturday.
