Totally Awksome

Hi friends, and happy 2019! I know I haven’t been active here lately, so I wanted to talk about why that is & what my plans are going forward.

My webcomic

I’m kind of at a crossroads as far as where to go/what to do with my webcomic, You’re Doing It Wrong. I haven’t updated it in a long time, and I’m not sure whether I want to continue it. This is for several reasons:

My day job has become more travel intensive, which makes it hard to keep up with a regular posting schedule. And I was already struggling to balance weekly updates around my job before. I don’t make money from my comic, & the added travel at work came with better pay, so I know what the priority is there.

Over the last year, I’ve gotten much deeper into cosplay. It’s an art form I’m really passionate about, & I want to keep growing my craftsmanship skills. Splitting my already limited free time between cosplay and comics also makes it hard to post regular updates.

I feel like a long-form webcomic is a lot of work for little reward. You’re Doing It Wrong is fully outlined/scripted & I know how it ends, but even at my old weekly update pace, it would take YEARS to get to that ending & share that payoff with everyone. And that can really kill my desire to work on it.

I’ve drawn some short-form educational comics about asexuality (here and here) that have reached more readers/gotten more feedback than the entire combined archive of my webcomic got over 5 years. This makes me wonder if my time is better spent making more short-form comics in that vein than continuing with my webcomic.

This is a more personal reason, but the friendship dynamic between the main characters in my webcomic is based on an IRL one that has since ended (that person & I are no longer on speaking terms). This wasn’t a big deal at first, but as the comic’s story goes on, sometimes working on it is a painful reminder/puts me in a not-great headspace.  

Another personal reason that has less to do with comics & more to do with IRL stuff… I’ve been questioning my gender for a while & finally (officially) came out this year as genderfluid. I know that has nothing to do with whether I have time to make art, but the gender questioning/exploration process is still a significant thing that’s taken up a lot of my mental/emotional energy this year.

So… what to do with my webcomic? I hate to stop working on something I started without finishing it, especially with as much work as I put into it (231 strips!). I also hate to just abandon a story that people are following. My readership is & always has been small, but I don’t like the thought of leaving them hanging. However, I have pretty much no motivation to keep drawing it. I truly feel happier drawing shorter comics that I can actually finish & post in their entirety, or maybe even get printed for local cons. I want to make more queer education comics, since the ones I’ve done have gotten such great responses & generated such awesome discussions.

All things considered, I’m going to put You’re Doing It Wrong on an indefinite hiatus. I won’t say I’ll never finish it, but I’m not going to update it regularly, or even frequently. If/when I post new strips, it will only be as I feel like it. I honestly hate this decision and I’m sorry. But I know it’s for the best. 

What’s next

It’s hard not to see my webcomic’s indefinite hiatus as “giving up,” but instead, I want to approach this as a new beginning. I’m going to keep making short-form comics and new cosplays in 2019, and I’m excited to share all of that work with you. Just because I won’t be updating my webcomic doesn’t mean I’ll stop creating - I’ll just be creating something different!

On that note, I’d like to try to be more active here again. The only place I’m active right now is Instagram (which has been a great platform for sharing cosplay stuff & getting more involved in that community). But I want to start sharing the things I post there on my Tumblr, as well. I’m updating my profile pic to something more in line with my gender feels. So I figured a literal rebranding like this would be as good a time as any to start posting again. :)

Hi friends! I know I’m not that active on here anymore, but I thought I’d still share my other social media in case you need to find me after December 17th:

Instagram: gckinsey

Facebook: gckinseycosplay

Twitter: gckinsey

AO3: gckinsey

DeviantArt: gckinsey

(Instagram is the only one where I’m reliably active these days, but I still maintain accounts in all the other places too.)

“That was Yuuri Katsuki from Japan you just royally insulted,” Yakov grunts.

“Not like that loser didn’t deserve it!” Yuri pipes up.

Viktor’s mouth falls open.

“That was Yuuri Katsuki?”

In which Viktor feels really terrible about the whole commemorative photo incident and apologizes to Yuuri in The Most ExtraTM way possible, only for Yuuri to drink too much to remember it. An expanded take on the banquet scene.

I wrote a fic for the @victuri-big-bang! 

Please check it out & give some love to my collaborator @watery-silver who created the gorgeous art for this story! :)

I made a new comic for Ace Awareness Week 2017!

This one addresses some of the assumptions people have made about me because I’m ace. Hopefully this will help spread some awareness of what asexuality is and is not. :)

Here are some other ace comics I’ve made:

Cake Walk (my questioning/coming out story)

You’re Doing it Wrong (special for Ace Awareness Week 2016)

I went on a Twitter rant about asexuality and the assumptions people make about it

(full transcript below the cut)