KC Newsletter! Feb. 2024

Hello! I hope this is all formatted correctly, I’m still working all this out so please be patient with me while I get my shit together here lmao

As usual I wrote a whole lot, probably way more information than anybody asked for, but there’s a lot going on for me to talk about!! The news topics change from month to month but I’ll try and put things under great big header sections so you can find the things you want to know more about and skip what you don’t. I don’t have anything like it today, but if it’s something time sensitive like a preorder window or something I’ll make it Big And Loud right here near the start so hopefully nobody misses it.

Newsletter start!

This month’s finances and what all got done!

It’s going up a little late, but here are February’s numbers:

As expected productivity was a lot more limited in February because I spent most of it dealing with invasive dental procedures pinging my OCD constantly; I only got four pages posted and maybe 7k more words into the Mile High Engage novel. My paycheck was $339.66, up around five from January after a combination of gaining and losing supporters and several declined payments.

Speaking of paychecks, a LOT of y’all have shuffled from Patreon to Ko-fi this month, so don’t get discouraged if the number on Patreon looks like it’s gone down! It’s going to get harder to get a single number at a glance as long as different platforms insist on making things difficult, so I’ll try to keep doing these posts for you to reference. Still not quite halfway to our lowest goal but it’s still early in the year, not time to panic yet lol.

Merch stuff!

I spent most of February getting the shop open again, since Storenvy became unusable. Pretty much everything has been moved over to the ko-fi page, and I DID eventually find a book printer here in Colorado so I’ll get volumes 2 and 3 restocked in the next couple months hopefully! I will do a big preorder party like we’ve done in the past, so keep an eye out for that if you need to finish out your set.

Also hey, the She plushes are up!! You can get a couple of Toulouse things in the shop now too! Slots for the plushes will open up on Monday, March 25th at 3pm MT, but don’t panic if they fill up fast. My partner Lee makes these by hand, so more will be available if you’re patient!

Credits?

Hey here’s a weird thing, I watch a lot of youtube and read a lot of independent Stuff, and a ton of them feature a list of supporters at the end of their installments. I think I’m gonna start doing that? Frankly I’ve never been interested in having my OWN name on things, but apparently a lot of folks are really into it. It’s not going to be retroactive, but from now on anytime I put out a new printed work (a full KC volume, a Special, or a novel), I’m gonna have a credits list in there somewhere!

I wanted to feature literally everyone contributing money but that gets kind of weird maybe since folks don’t actually start getting books until the $5 tiers, so that’s where it’ll be priced I think. I’m open to suggestions about this though, so if you’re in the lower support tiers and have Thoughts please feel free to send them in somewhere, I’ll even take tumblr inbox asks since this could be a good conversation to have in a public space.

This is intended for long-term supporters! You gotta be pledging for a nebulous couple of months before the book goes to print, which I have no way to specify since my printing schedule is super weird, and that’s when the list gets locked in. If you stop pledging sometime after that your name will stay in subsequent printings of the books it went up in, since you WERE supporting them when they were made. However! If you stopped pledging because you decide you just loathe Kidd Commander and everything it stands for, I’ll be happy to go back and remove your name from the list if you contact me about it.

This is a logistically weird thing to do this far in! Sorry I didn’t think of it earlier. Unlike this mailing list I’m gonna go ahead and add you to the credits if you’re pledging five dollars or more, since this would be absolute chaos to keep up with lmao. Please feel free to opt out for literally any reason, and if you’d like me to use a different name than what goes on your KC mail or your money accounts just let me know and I’ll put whatever you want. I am not close to printing anything new right at this moment, so you have plenty of time to think on it.

Thanks!

I keep saying I’m going to make a substantial post about novel progress, and it took long enough to get to that it’s almost an entire post on its own now lol. I’m putting it at the end here so you don’t have to scroll all the way through it if you don’t want to! Thanks for checking in, see you next time!

-Aria!

Upcoming Appearances!

Landmark Minicon
March 23, Commerce City, CO

Wicked West Comic Expo
April 13-14, Loveland, CO

Anime 307
September, 7-8, Cheyenne, WY

Rocky Mountain Con
Nov. 9-10, Denver, CO

_{I love going to conventions! If there’s one in or around Colorado you’d like to see me at, contact the con and have them get in touch with me.}

PS:

Novel progress!

Still ticking along! Sitting at roughly 30k words already, woof.

I'm using Scrivener to write now! Having to save through Dropbox is a huge pain in the ass as usual but the program itself is SO comfy to work with. It's even got a widget thing that lets you set up daily and overall goals for wordcounts, I've tentatively set the one for this first one to 90,000 mostly so I can keep an eye on how longwinded things are getting while I work on the first draft. The comic transcript with just the dialogue sits at 42k-ish and it's definitely not getting shorter so that's optimistic as far as printing possibilities go BUT: I said this would be indulgent so we're getting indulgent lmao

I think writing from the finished comic script is working well for me just because the comic IS the pared-down, brutally efficient version of the story (mhe's massive pagecount is more due to my lack of comic ability at the time than due to the actual story, imo), so it's keeping me from just going insane and writing kudzu into infinity. I have to be really aggressive with edits for the comic since every panel equals hours of work, but I have plenty of room to play in prose; there are some scenes I'm picking up off the cutting room floor and adding back in for sure, but feeling just a little railroaded by my own script is reassuring.

The thing I'm noticing the most is the anger is bleeding back into the story when we don't have the cartoon veneer to hide it behind. I always joke everything I write turns to horror eventually and I think it's really apparent in my prose. Phineas and Ulrich have never been meant to be capital G Good Guys anyway, but these versions that are lagging a couple arcs' worth of development behind are feeling especially like. Caustic? I think differences are something to be expected but it’s been strange going back and writing the characters and concepts as I understand them now, in the situations I put them in then. Ulrich Weiss is a completely different person than he was for the first like 150 pages of this comic, and his choices are different too. I'm curious to see how people feel about all of this! I think you’ll enjoy it as long as you don’t expect a beat for beat cover of the original, this is an adaptation. Comics and prose are different languages, we gotta localize.

I am also just DELIGHTED to get another shot at Hazard, and the scenes in the mines involving the deities. That was good stuff! It was all way beyond my skill level back then, but I feel like the fact that I recognize that now means I can maybe wrangle them better this time.

I’d like to get a sample chapter posted soon! I’m still feeling sort of gunshy about it but that’s real silly. Let’s aim for it to go out with the next newsletter. It’s MUCH different from the level of polish I’m aiming for with the novels and some of it is very old now, but if you’d like to get an idea of what my prose looks like before then I do have quite a bit of KC fiction posted on my AO3 account! I’m going to link you to my 98% canon collection, but feel free to browse any of it. Mind those tags, friends.

ok goodbye for real have a good month yall!