Guest Blog #3: GeMiNNi and Me

As promised, the third in the line up of guest blogs from the people who attended my workshop on blogging at the Montgomery Community College Writers’ Festival. This is from Kate Fazekas, a student at Montgomery County Community College, and an aspiring writer of Y/A Lit. She was born in San Francisco, but spent most of her childhood and teenage years in Japan and the Philippines. At present, she lives in Lansdale, PA, “with her wonderfully snarky husband Justin, a cat named Nightcrawler, and two gerbils named Albus and Thomas Kincaid Branagan. Her webcomic, Geminni, can be found here. Her post about GeMiNNi, is below:

In most company, I am a very quiet but friendly person. Some might call me timid. The truth is known to a select few, and they would be very happy to tell you that in reality, I am bat-bleep crazy. Life has trained me to mask my emotions to the best of my ability, but everyone needs an outlet. I found mine in creating a web comic I dubbed Geminni (with 2 n’s).

I honestly had no idea what I wanted my web comic to be about, only that the material would be lightly censored, and that it would be a place where I could be free to curse as much as I wanted. In reality, my swearing ability is awkward and embarrassing. I am still physically incapable of saying the “F-word.” I say “fudge-nuts”, and I call people “hass-holes.” My web comic would abound in sexual humor, anti-racist rants, and promote both racial and sexual tolerance.

I can truthfully say the main characters of Geminni, a single mother and her child, Kaley and Yun Szab, are based on the “angel” and “devil” aspects of my own personality. Kaley is gullibly sweet, while Yun is naturally cranky with a dark sense of humor. As I cranked out updates for Geminni, you start getting glimpses of the dark side of Kaley’s personality. If she was meant to embody the lighter side of my personality, what did that say about me?

Geminni ended up being a web comic with an eclectic mix of themes – real life, comedy, tribute, romance, and theological fantasy. Its charm lies in its wild and zany cast that includes a gay man with a temper and stalker tendencies, a women in her sixties with an outspoken fondness for sex toys, a cute yet bloodthirsty ghost from colonial America, a five-year-old pervert ,the meddling goddess of spring, Persephone , and a pair of perverted friends who view the world as their own personal playground. What can I say? As I have stated earlier, I have been accused of being bat-bleep crazy.

I have known for a while that Geminni will be a long-running series that will take a little over nine years to complete. It will be separated into three comics, Geminni (featuring the character Yun as a child), Geminni Level Up (featuring Yun as a teenager), and Geminni End-Game (featuring Yun as an adult). I am proud to say that Geminni has garnered a modest fan base on the web comic host, Drunk Duck, and has been listed as one of their top ten web web comics for almost two years. I’ve even been interviewed! Woo! I remember being very nervous, and I tend to ramble when I’m nervous. I remember after that interview, proceding to knock my head several times against my desk. My readers loved the interview, but it terrifies me that, like all things submitted online, that interview will always be there, to mock me and remind me of how terrible I was at the public-speaking… thing.

When I first started the comic in 2008, for the longest time the largest amount of viewers I would have in a week was 3. Now, on an average day, Geminni’s page-views are in the thousands, and is a favorite web comic for 1, 785 readers. That’s a pat on the back for me. Yay!

Thanks to all my beloved readers and Geminni Level Up will start on January 1, 2012! Stay tuned!