Totally Not Gay pace announcement + injury + life updates (Patreon)

Hey all, I wanted to mention (before you guys get charged for September if this bothers you!) that I'll be reducing the release pace of Totally Not Gay to one full-colored page per month for at least August-October. There are several reasons for this so I'll lay them out here:

1) I over estimated the amount of time comics take since it's my first one. The level that I want to complete this comic at takes a crazy amount of time, most of it surprisingly spent on setup and lining things. The painting takes a long time, but it's probably the least time-intensive part, which I was not at all expecting.

2) I've been drawing and especially painting so much that for the last 2-3 weeks I've been battling a pretty distressing wrist injury. This has sent me into a spiral of negative thoughts that I'm not cut out for this kind of pace with commissions and the Patreon, so I'm going to hold off for a bit on the amount of work until my wrist is able to properly heal at least.

3) This is potentially the last full month that I'll have with my boyfriend for a little bit, so I want to make the best of our time together. There's a pretty decent chance that my Visa will get renewed, and in time, but it's scary not to know, and I won't be certain for several weeks at the earliest.

4) I shouldn't have promised a 2-page per month pace without having the proper understanding of the time involvement and funding for it in place first. High-detail comic pages, especially as I've found out, are some of the most involved things we can make as illustrators, and I've calculated that one comic page is worth around +/- $600 of my time, from planning to framing, writing, lining, and finally painting. I'm making about ~$300 / month from Patreon right now, and while I'd be happy to spend all my time working on stuff here, it's become evident that I have to put more focus on commissions while my followers grow here to a level that supports that amount of time.

So that's that. I don't want you guys to be in the dark about me missing the every-two-week pace I initially set out on, but I also want to take of my mental and physical health before I return to that crazy pace. I could handle it if I didn't also have to take on 3-5 fairly big commissions per month, but doing even 3 full illustration commissions, the pinup of the month, and 2 full comic pages is a crazy amount of work, only made worse by my inexperience not knowing how involved comics are to make.

I hope you guys understand and I really, REALLY do want to make this the best comic I can make both for you guys and for myself, but right now I'm just not gonna be able to complete it as quickly.

Thanks for your understanding and patience with me and for sticking around all this time. It made me cry to see how many names I still recognize from almost a year ago on here and I hope I'll be able to continue to make you all happy in the future.

-Your goofy butt-loving woof, Kivu