Wow, okay, where to start?

I guess, first of all, I want to apologize for my very long, very unexplained absence. I know I've worried a lot of people, some of whom thought I had died because of how thoroughly and suddenly I vanished. To those people in particular, I'm very, very sorry that my shortcomings caused you to worry and, though I wish I hadn't given you such a scare, the fact that you were so concerned about my well-being was honestly very touching. This community really is full of some of the most compassionate people in the world whom I never thought would even spare a thought for someone like me, let alone worry that I might be unwell or even dead.

Also, I want to apologize to anyone who's been financially inconvenienced by my disappearance. When I knew I wasn't going to be able to update Four-Letter Word for an indefinite amount of time, I was a little too slow on my decision and there was a month (maybe two months; my memory of this time period is a little hazy now) where there was no new build but Patreon was still charging my patrons. I couldn't figure out how to put a freeze on my account so I switched the billing cycle from monthly to per creation in the hopes that, as long as I didn't make a new post on my Patreon, no one would get charged. As I had not withdrawn any of the funds from my Patreon balance for that period of time, I then tried to refund every one of my patrons for the period(s) where there was no update but they were still billed. However, Patreon's UI for refunding (at least at the time) was pretty lackluster. I had no way of knowing who I had already issued a refund to and Patreon seemingly allowed me to at least attempt to refund the same person multiple times so there might have been instances where I lost track of whether or not I had refunded a patron and tried to refund them again because I didn't want to miss anybody. I had a lot of patrons at the time so I got a little mixed up and my Patreon balance actually dove into the negatives (I assume because I did in fact refund some people multiple times) and I still might have missed some people. If my actions caused you to lose money in some way, I'm deeply sorry. I never had any intention of screwing people out of money so generously donated to my personal project. I'm truly very grateful to anyone who's ever pledged even a single dollar to me in the course of Four-Letter Word's development and I'm sorry for letting you all down.

All that said, I'm sure the next question many of you have is why? Well, that also comes back to Four-Letter Word. When I first started work on the project, I was very excited and put a lot of work into the first few updates. Like, a lot of work. The problem was, at least in my mind, I had set a precedent. I felt like people expected to get at least that much content each and every update or they'd be disappointed or maybe even regret pledging money to me. It was no small deal to me that people were willing to part with their money that could have easily gone to any number of much more worthwhile causes or things with far greater cost-benefit ratios to them. The last thing I wanted to do was betray that trust that I felt I had built between pledge and creator. The problem was that this was often not very realistic.

As things progressed, I thought it would get easier and faster to produce but I felt like a bit of a hack leaving so many things to Ren'Py's factory presets. So, even as I continued to try and make sure every update included a similar amount of content to consume, I was trying new things - many of them dead-ends - and spending more and more time working on the project and finding myself crunching more and more towards each deadline. I began to develop a very unhealthy relationship with my work where I was becoming very ill and stressed and began experiencing panic attacks. Even though no one had ever explicitly stated they would feel cheated if I produced a build that wasn't as much of an update as the last, I still held this deep-seated, irrational fear that that's how everyone would feel. In fact, I'm still not convinced that it's not true but I do at least have enough distance from the project now, after all these years, to acknowledge that there wasn't any factual basis for that fear. It might seem like a minor thing to be concerned about but as someone who's always worried too much about what other people think of me, it really was enough to make me mentally shut down. The fact that the build that never was released (but was half-finished) just had way more of everything than any of the past updates had added just exacerbated an already untenable situation.

As to why I was silent about my departure outside of a handful of friends, it's because I was too ashamed of my anxiety and my circumstances, which was entirely of my own making, and did not want to admit it to anyone. To this day, I've never even spoken about it to my family. I only ever told a few friends, (even fewer than the number that knew I was definitely still alive) although I guess that's changed now. Honestly, I've wanted to write this journal several times over the past couple of years but I've never been able to muster the nerve until today, and even then, it's only because I was unable to sleep. I couldn't stop thinking about this whole mess and how to organize my thoughts to explain it even semi-coherently. Even as I'm writing this, I'm sick to my stomach, shaking and dreading hitting that "Create/Update Journal" button, thinking about how everyone's going to judge me when they read this and see me in a different (worse) light. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm half-right. I don't know, and I may never know, but at some point I just have to be okay with being afraid and doing it anyway.

A lot of time has passed. This site seems to have changed a lot and feels entirely alien to me. Patreon has, too, and I'm not even sure if I remember my login information for that account. I don't think my Livestream page is even there anymore. (That's one thing that's actually dead!) I'm back, I think, but I'll definitely need some time to dust off the cobwebs and familiarize myself with everything again. I've been thinking about dusting off Ren'Py (I'm probably dozens of versions behind, now) and picking up Four-Letter Word again but I'm not sure if anyone even cares about it at this point since it's been so long. I'll have to take a very different approach to it for my own mental and physical health and I haven't exactly decided what that will be. I'll have to gauge interest in the project to see if it's worth pursuing again before I think about it too hard, I suppose. I'm not even sure how I'll do that but I guess, for a start, you could just let me know your thoughts since you've read this far through this monstrous journal post to get to this point. If you've never engaged with my visual novel and have no desire to, or you have and have no interest in it, or you would like to see it return and maybe even support it via Patreon again; all of that is very valuable information to me and it would be very helpful to know where it stands with you before I make any major decisions.

Thank you for taking the time to read all of this. I really appreciate it.

edit: An update on FLW.
edit 2: Some other updates.