Good morning, everyone!  There are a lot more of you than there was yesterday.  Hi!  Here’s a few cosplay related updates from me  :)

1.  I get to write a cosplay article for xoJane and I’m pretty excited.  It’ll focus on how to be encouraging towards plus sized cosplayers and how saying things like, “people might not want to see you dressed as that character because of your size” is not being helpful.  We get that you’re trying to warn the cosplayer of the bullies out there, but to be honest, from what I’ve seen/experienced plus sized cosplayers (or diverse cosplayers in general) already know that the bullies are out there and are cautiously going into cosplay anyway, so saying things like that just makes them even more worried.

2.  I’m pretty much going to do Princess Serenity next year, for sure.  She wasn’t on my list before but she is now thanks to this amazing fanart.  Also going to do steampunk femme Kid Flash and found some awesome fabric for it.  My wifey and I are talking about a third costume at the moment.  I’m not going to lie, I didn’t really think I’d be cosplaying this much let alone have so many people interested in me cosplaying, but now that I’m doing it I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.  If you’re looking at me as a role model for plus sized cosplay, then that’s amazing. If you’ve been debating on whether you should cosplay or not and my cosplay has someone pushed you to take the plunge, then that’s incredible.  That really makes me happy.  I never thought of myself as a cosplay role model, but that’s pretty cool  :)

Someday, I want to do a cosplay calender, with all sorts of diverse cosplayers.  Plus sized, different ethnicities, lgbt, men (that sounds weird but the two big cosplay calenders I know about do not have a single man in it and I KNOW they are out there cosplaying too, even if “Heroes of Cosplay” says that they’re cosplay is “boring”).  It’s just a dream for now, but who knows what the future will hold.  I mean I love “Cosplay for a Cause” and Yaya’s calender and stuff, but just… a calender with a variety of cosplayers would rock.  Or, you know, cosplayers who look more like me.  

3.  We’ve signed up for three conventions already next year and are just waiting to hear back.  This is Anime Milwauke, Anime Detour, and Naka-Kon.  We are also looking at Anime Central again but the artist alley isn’t up yet.  We will also be looking at CONvergence, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be dealers or not.  We might just go to that one just to go the first year.  We also want to look at a big, far away con, in the likes of Otakon or something like that. Just take a trip and go for it.

In regards to conventions, I’m always looking for suggestions on where to go.  Now that my wifey has weekends off, we can look at a lot of conventions because it won’t use nearly as much PTO.  At the conventions we’ll be there in cosplay, and have a table in artist alley.  Next year, we hope to have our books there.  Our cover artist was at a con with us last weekend and the covers generated a lot of buzz, so we hope to actually have physical copies of the books.  At the moment, our publisher has been merged with a larger publisher, which seems to be a good thing, so far, since now there’s more resources at our disposal  :)

That’s everything.  If you just started following me, hello and welcome! During that whole mess yesterday I broke 600 followers, so yay!