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- KC Newsletter! December 2024
KC Newsletter! December 2024
we lived bitch!
This issue: 2024 final scores, plans for next year! This is a long one, grab something to drink.
This month’s finances and what all got done!
By the end of December, I’d finished three more comic pages, written over 20k new words of prose, and I was pulling in around 850 dollars for the month.
And for the year! I finished 61 comic pages and wrote, uh. A horrifying amount of prose. I’ll try to keep better track of it this time around. Also somehow ended up getting to keep working on the comic, so that’s neat!
Listen I was positive this whole endeavor was going to fail, like, I was Unwell thinking about having to give up the comic for most of this year. I’ve always been pretty open about how frustrating it is to work so hard on this thing for this long and barely scrape by; I don’t think that’s ever going to change just due to the nature of the project itself, it’s too weird and intense to ever take off in a way that won’t have me stressing over various social media numbers or gaining/losing five bucks a month. Technically we’re still not actually making the original goal; I am just covering basic rent with my entire earnings each month and we’re certainly nowhere close to hiring any additional artists, but! BUT! Things are looking a damn sight better than they were a few months ago. There was money in the bank to keep our living arrangements this month and, probably, there will be next month too. That’s way more than I could have ever hoped for at the start of 2024.
Things are uncertain, but they’re always going to be like that. Even if we’re just kicking the ball down the road I’m fucking relieved to have this time at all and I want you all to know how grateful I am that y’all rallied as much as you did. I promise I will use what you’re all giving me as productively as I can for as long as I can, and hopefully by the time we’re facing another new Reckoning there will also be a new way to deal with it. For now we’re gonna keep taking it one month at a time, and I hope you’ll stick around.
And hey, this is a full year since the newsletter started! Thanks for reading the newsletter!
Housekeeping!
Before we get entrenched in the new shit let’s put a cap on last year’s stuff:
Aside from one outstanding Canada order and one nonfunctioning supporter address (both of whom I have contacted or attempted to contact), all the preordered books have been sent out!! I’m gonna keep an eye on my po box, but fingers crossed they all get where they’re going. I’m really proud of this book and I hope y’all enjoy it! Thanks so much for helping me make it!!
I don’t really ask for Capital R Reviews or anything since that sort of stuff in any official capacity doesn’t do much for my operation here, but I HAVE been asked if it’s okay to post pictures and such from the books on social media by very thoughtful folks worried about spoilers and stepping on toes. As I’m fond of saying, fan posts on social media are an excellent way to support this thing, so please feel free to share your thoughts or photos or whatever you like! If you tag me on tumblr I’ll reblog it too, I know we’re few and scattered so I try my best to connect readers with readers whenever I can. The only thing I worry about with this sort of thing is spoiling the extras for folks whose mail might take longer to arrive, but at this point most people should have access to it, and frankly I sort of doubt anyone is going to stumble across KC content unless they go searching intentionally anyway hehe. It’s extremely cool that this stuff got asked though, I really appreciate how considerate everybody is around here.
Anyway! If something is weird with your mail, you can contact me here and I’ll do my best to get it figured out. I didn’t send out tracking info to book club folks because I hate to bug y’all unless I need you to do something absolutely necessary, but I do have tracking, and I’m happy to pass it along if you decide you want it OR you’re concerned and want to check on the parcel.
Stuff you can look at if you want!
I’ve talked at length before about why I hadn’t posted the ebook versions of the print volumes in the shop. The reasons generally boil down to this:
KC already really struggles to get engagement and any sort of visible community. Discords and algorithmic social medias have pretty well decimated traditional fan communities, and KC has never been able to work up the inertia to pull one together beyond its core readers who have been here forever already. People getting into a routine of checking the site for updates is the only chance of like, making sure people think of it often enough to stick with it, get news that it’s still alive and updating, OR notice that there is a comment section (and, possibly, other readers to interact with) at all. I’ve been afraid that folks will just pass around the pdf versions in private servers, blow through them in an afternoon and move on.
-I am still anxious about this, and nobody anywhere has responded to my concerns with much beyond “oh shit, good point. that’s probably gonna happen, sorry.” It is what it is.
-ON the other hand, going into this year with the world at large being what it is for queer creators, especially angry apostate queer creators, AND knowing that every internet space seems to be run by children who don’t actually know how it works: I am now more anxious about something happening to destroy the site in some capacity and my comic disappearing from access overnight.
Am I putting another nail in my own coffin here? Possibly. Accessibility is more important to me. You can now get the first two volumes of KC in pdf form on ko-fi. If you’re supporting with five or more dollars a month, you got a discount code back in December! It’s expired now though. By the way, now that the physical books have mostly had time to reach their destinations, those email addresses are also where you’ll get the Volume 4 PDF soon. Keep an eye out!
The plan for the shop pdf’s is to stagger the releases roughly an arc behind the current one on the website, so hopefully if people binge the downloads and want more they’ll transition to the site at some point. Not much else I can do beyond that! And if things DO go south in some major way, I’ll just put the remaining ones up and be done with it. If that’s happening we got bigger problems.
Also: Honest Work updated. Not sure how many of y’all are keeping up with that weird little thing, but it is a KC thing I put out last month so there ya go.
WHAT DO WE WANT FROM 2025
Continued Business As Usual, mostly. But there are a few things I’d like to aim for:
Like last year, I’m aiming to get 100 new pages done. Seems lofty given the last few years, but 2024 was an insane improvement in productivity and I feel like this is a doable goal if I don’t have to babysit another category five family event. I used to crank out around 150 each year, which is the number I’m most comfortable hitting, but let’s try for the lower one first lmao.
I really, really want to at least finish the draft for Grist to the Cannon. In response to still struggling to meet financial goals with the comic, I’ve fully integrated prose writing into my daily workflow and consider novel work to be as important as comic work, since it’s looking increasingly likely we’re only gonna get through two more comic arcs unless something drastic (positive!!) happens between now and then. Please understand, I still have no intention of quitting the comic until it’s absolutely necessary! In the Most Ideal Future I’m doing both alongside each other, but as I’ve said before, I just want this story told. I’m hoping if we’re lucky the prose can help pick up some slack where the comic is failing. There’s no money in prose, but there’s no money in comics either. Maybe together they can equal Some money.
Gonna start that youtube channel for traditional work (and the occasional process video for digital stuff), hopefully sooner rather than later. Still kinda figuring out exactly what that will look like, but when it happens I’ll let y’all know. Is there some specific Type Of Art Thing you’d like to see me do with a video format? I’m thinking less about Tutorial Stuff and more Draw With Me type things, since that’s what I end up learning more from myself, but I’m very open to suggestions.
KC Special 3 is still just fucking sitting there waiting to be inked, but my god we have GOT to get out of the Caravan first. I assure you every day I scroll by its file and sigh deeply, I swear to all the gods that Agatha’s Special will happen before I die. TF2 #7 came out, anything is technically possible.
Actually let’s talk about those novels
So, with prose getting a little more serious, let’s discuss it a little! It’s still a ways out before any of this comes to pass, but I don’t want anyone to feel surprised about what they are or aren’t gonna be getting.
The next thing on the slate is probably the Detour novella I talked about before. It’s looking a little closer to a February release, and after shipping out Volume 4 I’ve rethought a few things about how this is gonna work.
The Detours are meant to be a bit of an experimental space for me, so I’d like for them to be logistically simple and quick to put out, maybe even more than one per year, but ALSO listen. I can’t. Ship out a hundred books at once every time I make something small like this lmao. I’m also not sure people even want them! I’m not sure how any of the prose will do! The things people WANT from prose books are different from comic books! So!
Detours will be digital-only, unless it seems worth all our time to do a physical print. If they just go fucking nuts and people go “Aria PLEASE let me buy it on paper” then I’ll oblige, and I’ll probably make some cheap lil guys to take to shows, but we’re sticking with epubs here at the outset. Like the volumes, if you’re supporting with five or more dollars a month, I’ll email it to you when it comes out! That’s simple enough, feel free to chaos dunk that file in the garbage if you don’t want it in your life.
As for the mainline novels, the big puzzle for me is that I don’t want to send people books they don’t want. Y’all signed up for comics! But a lot of y’all HAVE expressed early interest in the prose too, so I don’t want to make assumptions in either direction. I feel like this is a hard thing to ask of y’all, since I’ve never released a full scale novel before: how are you supposed to commit to something sight unseen? How do we minimize regret here. This ain’t a booktok kickstarter, I’m not interested in hustling novels at people who don’t care about them, and I do in fact care about y’all’s experience with my work even after you spend money on it lmao
I feel like when it comes to prose novels, I don’t buy paperbacks to READ them, right. If I’m buying a physical copy of a novel it’s because I already read it, either by borrowing it or getting a digital version, and fell in love with it enough to go buy a nice hardback edition so I have it forever now. This is the category I assume anyone in the book club would fall into: if you get far enough you WANT a physical copy at all, you want a nicer one than the version I’m selling at cons to the many, many readers who work differently from me. So, book club folks will get the epub, WON’T get the paperback, but you WILL get the fancypants hardcover I plan to offer a little while after the initial release. If you’re like a super megafan collector and really want both editions, you are entitled to a paperback as well! I will be happy to send you one of those as well if you ask.
This means by the time you have to make a decision about whether you want the novels at all, you’ll have had time to actually read some of my serious writing, and in fact the book you’re getting. Nobody will say no at first, change their mind after they’ve read it and feel like they missed out on their copy, and I won’t be printing and shipping books where they’re not wanted!
This is a learning experience for me, it could go horribly wrong or change with the second novel, I don’t know! But let’s give it a shot and see how it goes.
As far as a report on the novel development itself: I think it’s going very well.
State of the Artist
I sprained my ankle at the gym last month, just enough to mean I couldn’t go to the gym for a few weeks, and jesus christ it’s like every single status ailment came back at once. How the hell did I even function before rowing regularly. I’m SO excited to get back to it, New Year’s Crowds be damned.
Let’s do our best this year! Fortify! Don’t hurt your ankle!
-Aria
Upcoming Appearances!
VinCon
March 1-2, Fort Collins, CO
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March 25th, Commerce City, CO