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- KC Newsletter! January 2026
KC Newsletter! January 2026
We're late again but I'm blaming Lee this time.
This issue: All quiet, for once
This month’s finances and what all got done!
I posted four new comic pages in January and, by my count, wrote about 17k words of new prose! Most of it is novel work so I can’t share much of it yet, but the draft is now comfortably novella-sized.
As it tends to go, roughly a week after the first decrease in almost a year a completely new person decided to start pledging the exact amount lost, so I’m making about 915 USD a month again. Regardless of whether I post about losses this bizarre thing happens more often than you’d think, and it’s always somebody I’ve never seen or heard from anywhere in the community. It keeps us in business though! What a weird job.
January was blessedly calm, all things considered, so there isn’t a lot to go over! But here’s what I have for you today.
Novel Progress
It’s the real early days of this new thing still, where I feel like every other story I’ve made was a fluke and my luck ran out with the last one; a feeling that gets objectively stupider as I finish more projects. The first draft of anything is also boring as hell because it’s mostly just talking to myself and visualizing. I am gathering up a shitload of raw materials before I get to work on the cool thing I actually set out to make and that overwhelming amount of homework, coupled with my idiot brain convincing itself every single time that it doesn’t know how to do this task we have been doing for more than a decade, is probably a big part of why so so many stories stall out and don’t get finished.
Copying Pratchett’s “400 words a day no matter what” method got me through this phase with the last novel and it’s working well so far with this one! Even if it’s some stupid fucking bullshit just huck it into the draft and fix it later, we need dough, we need various sauces and oils, just get some shit into the kitchen. Despite my logical understanding that it isn’t the case, Lizard Brain is still very firmly of the opinion that writing stories is impossible, so I don’t have a snappy little moral to put here at the end. I just thought maybe it would be encouraging to someone else to know that even people who finish things feel this way lol
I’ve had a title in mind for months that I should really start using, but it turned out to be in use already by a social media startup that hadn’t got further than its landing page when I found it, which isn’t technically a dealbreaker but Ugh. Logistics could get weird if it does go somewhere in the time it takes me to finish the book. I really liked what I came up with so I do hate to change it, but it seems silly to have the entirety of the English language to work with and still have to share with something else. There’s tons of time before I really need to commit to anything at least.
The real trouble is A Wretched Analog was the perfect title for this arc…
All that supporter restructuring is coming along
I’ve planned out most of February as the month I’m getting my shit together with all the various financial support platforms, so hopefully by the time the next newsletter rolls out I’ll have done up most of what I said I’d do in 2025’s last letter. I’ve written up a basic little script for a new introductory video and hopefully I’ll feel like dragging my shambling husk in front of a camera to film it soon! Every year as I evolve further into a life form suited for telling stories and Nothing Else I am less photogenic, but people like putting a face to things, and every time I do a video like this it ends up bringing in at least a few new people so I’m gonna do my best. I’ve gone in and polished up the author site now that Grist isn’t brand new and tidied up a few odds and ends on the comic site, so hopefully if we do reach any new folks they’ll have an easy time figuring out what’s going on.
It’s odd how people in the prose world put so much more emphasis on My Real Human Face; my goofy cartoon avatar seems to be a real annoyance to the various event organizers and entities I work with. Everybody really, really wants those glossy headshots. We are not getting that, but I do have a plan. You know that opening shot in Hbomberguy’s Scanline video where he and his editor are low-budget bleeding to death next to their names in the credits? One of these days.
Speaking of Support
If you saw that I added a side goal to the ko-fi page to help with paying my editor a decent fee next time I need his services again, I’ve taken it down since uh. Ko-fi apparently just lumps any money I make at all into that total, which means it is completely useless as a separate tip jar. Let me tell you the kind of panic I went into when I checked the status bar this morning and it looked like it had accumulated around 500 Unaccounted For Dollars I thought I’d never actually received, lol lmao.
I’ll figure out another way to go about this! We got time.
State of the artist
i wish the weather was nice enough for me to go skating more often
Oh— Lee suggested I start adding a little Thing down here to remind everybody what our support goals are and where we’re at on them. I feel like I already kinda do that in the monthly recap at the beginning of these letters, and I always assume if you’ve made it as far as subscribing to these emails then you already know about all that stuff. BUT: smarter people achieve more stability than me by doing this sort of thing, and as I said I am absolutely not a reliable example of how normal people use the internet or do anything else, so I suppose it can’t hurt to try. The simple task of adding this loomed so huge in my consciousness that I put off writing this newsletter a full week beyond when I planned to, so you can blame Lee for when this is going out.
god dammit lee
-Aria
Kidd Commander is funded by its readers! If you’d like to help keep it going, you can do that through ko-fi, paypal, or patreon. You can find all the goals for this project here!