The store
For various reasons I’ve decided to close my Etsy and simply retire out of FFXIV fan stuff. This has always been a side effort that was fueled more by my love for the story and lack of stuff being made. However story hasn’t been all that interesting to me. Count me among those who would unsubscribe if I wasn’t locked into a house.
There are other forces though that were developing last year that made it just bad to continue for something that is not a source of income:
- Etsy itself has grown increasingly difficult to contend with by trying to force people to use their shipping, for either messing up or charging people for it, and extending fees on even listings that were put away.
- In addition, the EU has made it increasingly confusing to try to engage with people overseas. Adding fees, more registrations, and all sorts of difficult to understand rules for packaging and shipping– a casual seller doesn’t have time or money or any real reason to understand and comply with those regulations. No thanks.
- Tariffs come into effect in a week. Considering most merchandise is outsourced overseas for production, yeah, that’s not going to work. The companies will have to raise their prices, everything will increase, then when you raise the prices for the customers, they’ll balk at it because their funds will be reserved for things more important like food and essential goods, not elective goods. Everything points to the seller holding the bag for it.
In sum, don’t want to make product for FFXIV. Don’t like Etsy. Can’t sell overseas. Tariffs suck. Store closed.
Other art and writing
- I am not open for any art commissions or projects. I have not drawn anything digitally in a year and my last projects all were hand drawn (and only finished for print digitally). If for some reason I am, I will post about it on social media.
- I have some rough drafts for endings for my book “Queen of Swans” but after thinking about it some more, I think it would work better as two separate books. Whether I get to rework it this year and do that online change I don’t know. But I may , if time permits, I will likely begin reworking the website and take it down.
- Thank you to the random fanfiction.net people who have tried to reach out to me through that platform. I don’t know that I can get back in to use the messaging system so when you sign with a contact (discord, email or something) I will write back. It really surprised me to have seen messages from fans of my old fanfic work which I think showed good voice but needed so much editing xD. It made me realize that maybe I timed my entry into the serial novel world badly. Had I tried harder to understand what emerged these past few years I might have a viable side career.
Life
- Overall there are many positive things but family and work is keeping me pretty busy. I’m thankful that we are all relatively healthy (stably) for now.
- Job situation is tenuous and if I lose my job, I will probably be focused on closing up things and then taking some time off to write and engage with people differently.
Social media
- Twitter is done. No thank you. Not a fan. Purged all my posts but I’m sure they’ll resurface somehow which is part of the reason I still have my account and turned it off.
- Scaling back on Meta. My FFXIV account is gone.
- Bluesky is the only place I’ll be checking in on, but when I joined it wasn’t going to be a fandom account but a “me exploring safe shareable things” account. It’s updated more than here though, so if you want to check on me there, please do! https://bsky.app/profile/plumfairy.bsky.social
Travel
- No big plans for Japan this year (old picture inserted).
- Really want to scale down all travel as work is full of it and have come back almost every time from both personal and work travel with COVID or a cold. I’m tired of being sick.
- Personal travel focus will be more domestic this year, when it resumes.
The Swann Lodge 