I imagine these are difficult things to juggle for Melissa, as the same could apply to her work as well.
All that is true. But I think there's an even more fundamental restriction at play, which is there's a limited number of stories that are appropriate for
a type of distribution/media. I love captions. But there's fundamental limitations to captions where there's types of stories/story telling that are ill-suited for that type of media. Now, to be clear: I do not prescribe to the belief that the number of stories (not story
types) are finite. I believe any author has it in them to write as many stories as they want. Good stories? Different question. But so long as the body is healthy and the mind is willing, I believe a writer can keep writing as long as they wish.
However, any kind of medium has positives and negatives. We've talked about this before, but I think more so than ever, we're seeing the fallout of publishing material immediately as it's finished, and cutting up chapters into parts.
The positives are that it's a regular output, and it supports a patreon model which funds more output.
But the negatives are pretty obvious. Stories benefit from editing, which you really can't do. Not the type of editing that enables you to look at your story as a whole.
And most importantly, it naturally incentivizes each part to end on a mini-cliffhanger to encourage continued subscription. This problem isn't unique to Melissa. Most creators on that space, especially after a year or so on the platform, start falling into this pattern.
And perhaps the biggest negative (at least it would be for me as an author): It means that you're committed to a story even if you realize there are problems that require rework. I think most people assume and understand how patreon creators get burned out. I mean, we all get burned out on our jobs even if we love what we do because it's the same thing, day in day out.
But to me, it's not just that I'd get burned out doing it regularly. It's the problem of not being able to pivot. If there's a story that I started as an idea that interested me, but I got far enough that it satisfied my curiosity: I'd just either finish it quick just to say it's done, or be satisfied enough to leave it as reference and move on to something else. But I have that luxury because I don't publish those works.
I feel some of the convoluted parts of the story feel even more so because of the poorly paced rolled out rolling out of the story.
Or conversely, parts get increasingly poorly paced because of the "need" to address an issue brought on in previous parts that could have been solved by editing if the story allowed for it. But since you can't edit the previous parts, you're stuck with info-dumps to try to clear up where the story is at. You often hear stories about how XYZ movie was in an unwatchable state, only to be saved in editing during post production.
