TL;DR – New pages for Chapter 4 of Key to the Future’s Fate will start being posted on my usual every-week-except-the-first schedule beginning THURSDAY, JANUARY 7TH, 2027. Patrons will get to see Development Sketches and Finished Pages this year, however.

Soooo, in case you haven’t heard already, I’m not actually going to be posting the new chapter this year. Not because I’m planning to stop the comic, let me make that clear. I’m literally working on pages, just not posting them yet.

There’s a lot of reasons for it. The primary one is the fact that I’ve realized I don’t have the most healthy relationship with the (visual) art that I produce. Most months, I’m spending ¾ weeks plugging away at Future’s Fate, then getting burned out, so I do nothing for the last week. I’ve done virtually no drawings throughout 2025 except comic pages and thumbnails for it. That burnout leaves me with little energy for other projects, like the tabletop RPGs I run, so I end up playing catch-up on them constantly. It’s… not a viable system.

I did some thinking on it, and while I’m frustrated at the idea of the comic taking longer to produce (especially with how slow and meticulous I can be), I’d rather it roll into another year rather than continuously burning myself out just to keep up. I’ve considered other options – such as trying to simplify my process/style – but ultimately I just can’t bring myself to compromise on that kind of thing. This comic has been with me – if only in concept – since at least like 2009ish, and part of the joy I get from it is experiencing the ways that I grow as a creator while making it, and how my capacity for design evolves.

That said… there’s a lot of stuff I want to try or practice that, honestly, I wasn’t really planning to try until after Future’s Fate was finished. I want to experiment a little with game development (mostly visual novel stuff), and learn more about the different digital art functions I haven’t discovered yet. With the rigorous schedule Future’s Fate asks of me, though, I just haven’t been able to find the time or energy to do that.

So, I made the choice to keep the new pages under wraps just a little longer to ensure I have an even more sizable buffer to celebrate 2027, which will be the 10TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR OF FUTURE’S FATE! As it happened, I consider Chapters 1-3 to be the first “Part” of the comic, so stopping between 3 and 4 made the most sense to me. Having more of the buffer should HOPEFULLY mean we’ll be able to go through 2027 without any stumbling blocks in the schedule! Plus… readers were already going to have to wait until the last ⅓ of 2026 before I was going to post new pages anyway. Not that I want to keep y’all waiting, but I’m gonna NEED the extra time.

I also have a lot of other things that will/are coming up in 2026 that will make keeping up with pages harder. I’m aiming to move out of my childhood home, which will naturally require way more planning and coordination I can’t spend on the comic. I’ve also been working more, in part to save up for the move, but ALSO so I could get medical insurance to cover the HRT THAT I’M ON NOW!!! Yeah if you somehow haven’t heard, I’m going by Emma now, and this comic’s being made by a trans woman!!!

Even with all of that, I AM still making pages. I’m just expecting fewer of them from myself this year and giving myself a wider timeframe to finish them. That, and I’m also building in space to get to all of the other artistic things I’ve been hoping to try/practice/etc. I need to experiment a bit, try to figure out a healthier routine for making the comic going forwards. If all goes well, that should hypothetically mean not needing such huge breaks to account for the burnout.

Thank you all for your patience and understanding. I gotta stress that I DON’T WANT to be taking this extended hiatus, but I just cannot continue working on it the way I have. I’ll see you all in 2027 with the TRUE start of Chapter 4; I can’t wait to show you all what I have cooking up…