Maybe Not

Well, turns out the proofing process on Createspace takes a while to complete, so Hero Go Home might not be ready in time for Christmas. My proof copy is due to arrive around Dec. 12, and then I'll probably have to make some fixes which will delay the process further. On the other hand, I'll probably end up with a horribly ugly one-of-a-kind proof copy that I can use as the prize in a contest or something someday.

Just in Time for Christmas (I Hope)

Although it's still under review, I thought I'd let you know now that, very soon, you can own an actual physical printed version of Hero Go Home. I will post the link where you can purchase it as soon as it is available. I plan to follow up soon with print versions of Digger Breaks Through and Death Wave, although perhaps not in time for Christmas.

I've also been noodling new T-shirt ideas that may be available very soon. And there may be a major surprise announced in the very near future, if I decide that I can actually pull it off.

The point is, I need to get more serious about making money off of Hero Go Home, and the best way to do that, as far as I can tell, is to have stuff available to make money off of. I have some ideas to bring in traffic, but I don't want to spend money on them until I have some options for making some of that money back, and three e-books isn't going to cut it.

Oh, and if you're not reading Run, Digger, Run!, you should give it a try. We're eight weeks into the story now, and things are starting to heat up. I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails, getting the daily episodes posted (and today's episode, frankly, was a little rushed--I am committed to the 500-word limit, but today's episode needed about a hundred more words or so before the big cliffhang), but the characters are firming up and the momentum is starting to build. Give it a try, and I hope you like it.

So tonight, to (prematurely) celebrate breaking Hero Go Home into print, I'm drinking some cheap champagne. Also because tomorrow morning, I have to go to divorce class, which is the final step before my divorce is final. I keep hoping that I'll feel relieved once it's over, but right now, it still sucks.

It's Here! Hero Go Home Ebook Now Available

I've been looking forward to getting this one out there for a while now, and the day has finally come! Green monkeys and a Silver Scorpion! A Man Who's Known By Many Names! Balloon Armor! Ninja Robots! A Valkyrie Riding a Giant Wolf! A Deus Ex Machina! An Alien Invasion! Superbattles Galore! Hell on Earth! All in Color for a Dime!

Okay, that last one was a lie. It's a prose novel, and it's $3.99. But all the rest, seriously. Go read it.

Find it at Smashwords here. I'll get the Amazon Kindle link up as soon as it finishes churning through Amazon.

ETA: The Kindle version can be purchased here.

Wrapping Up and Looking Forward

No, this post is not about my impending divorce, although the title certainly fits that as well.

Hero Go Home will be officially wrapping up next week. The final chapter publishes on July 1, and with any luck, I'll have the entire thing available as an ebook by August 1, exactly one year after I published the first chapter on-line.

The experience has been really interesting. Since I had already written two previous drafts of the story, I was able to keep up with deadlines at many points by simply defaulting to large chunks of stuff that had already been written. On the other hand, entire chapters were written completely from scratch, and the storyline overall is very different from the previous drafts, even though some incidents play out almost exactly the same.

What has really been interesting for the last few weeks, though, is how the process of writing the climax has progressed. Normally, when writing the climax, I really barrel along. I can sometimes barely ooze out the middle act, but when I get to the big action setpiece at the end, I get in the zone and can knock out 5,000 words in a day, easy.

This time, though, strangely, exactly the opposite has happened. Forced by the deadlines of weekly serialization, I cranked out the middle chapters at a good clip. And now that I'm at the end, that same weekly chapter pace has me lingering over every paragraph, rereading and polishing over and over.

And then comes the agonizing choice of what to do next. Part of me wants to do the Johnny-Dollar-Meets-Cthulhuzilla book, while part of me wants to try writing for one of those houses that publishes exploitative crap under house names. Then again, part of me wants to write something that my daughter will enjoy reading. Guess which option I totally don't have an idea for? There's also another Digger novel partially plotted, but I'm a little Digger'd out right now.

Tiny Progress

So I've dipped a tiny toe into the advertising waters by placing a tiny button ad on Girl Genius. Which is to say, I never see the ad when I click over there to check on it, but I have gotten some traffic in from it, so I know it's there sometimes. Apparently, even though I bid one price worldwide, the system breaks the bid down into regions, so basically, my ad is showing on Girl Genius everywhere but in the U.S., where the majority of my target audience is. I'm not sure how to fix that.

I'm placing the ads through Project Wonderful, which seem to be only wonderful for webcomics so far (in fact, I originally started the account when I was putting together the Hero Go Home webcomic, but never used it).

Here's the cool thing about Project Wonderful: it's set up like an auction, so you're bidding for space on the site, and your bids are automatically regulated so you never pay more than you have to.

Here's the bad thing about Project Wonderful: it's set up like an auction, so if your site has really low traffic (like mine, though growing slowly), you may get no one bidding on your site, and therefore make no money from ads.

So traffic is the key. And the two steps I've taken recently--adding Movie Monday and Out of the Vault, and placing the Girl Genius ad--have noticeably increased traffic, though it's still barely comparable to this blog, let alone a successful one. Networking would be good, except that I've pretty much cut ties with most of the people I should be networking with. The closest thing I've got to a networking arrangement was the guest appearances by naamah and sargon, who are also serializing a novel (an idea I shamelessly stole from them), but I haven't linked it because our audiences don't really overlap at all. I need to fix that; they did help me out, after all. So I'll just put a big NSFW label on it or something.

And all the things I'm trying to do to increase the viewership of the blog take away time from producing content for the blog. This is really hard, and I worry, now that a couple of people have read the first chapter and no further, that I need to go back and punch up the beginning to keep people reading. But I also need to be moving forward. Aaaarrggghhh, too many things to do and no idea whether any of them will do any good in the long run.

Ninja Robot Super Battle

Fists and feet are flying at Hero Go Home this week, featuring not only a fun chapter, but my favorite Easter Egg so far. Go check it out here.

Something Different

Today's Extra over at Hero Go Home is something a little different, and it was a lot of fun to put together. I'll probably end up doing more like it in the future. We'll see.

The job is okay, although the hours are shorter than I'd hoped so far. One thing that surprises me is how sore I am. I'm not doing the stockroom thing like I was before, so the job is far less strenuous. But I am on my feet for several hours at a time, and given just how inactive I've been for most of the year (between the very sedentary desk job I had for most of the first half of the year, plus all the chair-time I've put in creating features for the two blogs, plus just stupid stuff like playing games on Facebook), my body wasn't ready for it. It's a sad reminder that I'm approaching 50 and my body, never very fit to begin with, doesn't bounce back as quickly as before.

Yeah, I Know

I can't settle on a header design I like. After Halloween, I tried something science-fictiony, but it didn't turn out well, and I just didn't like looking at it. I went back to the noir header, but I was tired of looking at it. So then I decided to try something else I'd been thinking of doing a long time ago: redoing the Digger header I used a while back with a different approach to the heroes. The only one who still uses the same illustration is Angar, and I'll probably be changing him around soon, because he's bald in the book.

And as that was happening, something went kablooey in Blogger and my background tiles are no longer showing up. So I've had to change to a flat color for now while I try to figure that out.

Oh and speaking of headers, if you're not visiting Hero Go Home every week, you've been missing out on some Easter Eggs. A brief recap of recent weeks, told in headers...

I've not received one comment about this, on the blog or in person. Not actually sure if anyone noticed.

The Halloween Extravaganza Begins! Also, Book Fear!

Welcome to October! There's a new banner up top and a ton of obscure Halloween content sloshing your way in the next month. There's also a new chapter up on Hero Go Home today, and it's finally leading into the real action of the book. I'm realizing two things about this: number one, this is becoming not just a serialized novel, but more like a multimedia experience. Every week brings an Extra, and every Extra adds a new aspect to Digger's world.

And they're not just illustrations: there has also been a screenplay excerpt, for example. And in coming weeks, there might be even more variety--ideas I'm tossing around are audio clips, Champions character sheets, flash fiction or bonus short stories, even another comic strip or two. I'm even playing with the header to reflect the turn the story is currently taking, and I'm debating whether to make that a permanent feature, with the header changing with every new chapter (probably not, but you never know).

But number two: I really suck at promotion. Hero Go Home has about as close to zero readers as you can imagine. I get maybe 10 hits a week, if I'm lucky. Which tells me that the story is boring. And as much extra value as I try to add, if the central story is boring, I lose.

There has not been a fast-moving plot so far, I admit; I've been taking that Lords of the Rings-like approach of introducing the world and the main characters gradually, gently, letting the reader get to know them as they're getting to know each other. Things start to kick into a higher gear with today's chapter, and I hope that as that happens, readership picks up.

And on a separate note, there's the idea of marketing. Here's the deal: the business of publishing has for years followed a pretty standard template, exemplified by the advice you hear from professional authors at conventions and conferences all the time. The conventional wisdom is this: "Money flows to the writer."

That is to say, if your work is any good at all, you will find a publisher willing to pay you a fair advance and royalties for the rights to publish your work. This relationship benefits everybody: publishers get quality new material to publish, authors get (hopefully) a decent sum of money for their work, and readers know that what they're buying met some minimum standard of quality and professionalism in order to have been printed at all.

But there are disadvantages to the system, as well. High expenses and declining readerships mean fewer books published, therefore fewer opportunities for new writers. The hit mentality means some books will receive little to no support after publication, and few chances for authors who aren't immediate bestsellers to continue their careers. And every time a coveted slot is given to an author based on celebrity rather than on quality of work (Washingtonienne, for example), it makes the argument that books are published on merit that much harder to swallow.

Which is a long-winded way of getting around to saying this: I've been struggling with whether to continue serializing the story, or pull it and try to sell it conventionally. Because on the one hand, the donation box may never make me a dime, and I would love the respectability and cachet of a traditional publisher. And there are people, like a certain outspoken publisher who recently posted on Facebook about this, who believe that a book that has not gone through the filter of a publishing house must be shit.

But on the other hand, I've also read some posts by another fairly successful up-and-coming author on Facebook who is relating some really scary news about how the publishing world is being upended by the new realities of the Internet (in the same way that the definition of news and the business of journalism is being permanently changed). The fact is, the standard model of the publishing world is becoming more and more rare, and may soon vanish altogether. My free webnovel with its myriad multimedia extensions may be the model of the future, if only I could get the confidence to push it out there into the wider world.

And then, of course, there's the part of me that whispers evil in my ear at this time of night, the part that say it's not worth trying to market the novel because nobody will buy it anyway. After all, if it was really any good, I would be getting readers from links and word-of-mouth. The lack of traffic is simply an indication that I'm not giving people something they want or value. Trying really hard not to listen to that voice.

HGH Update

It's Friday, which means there's another chapter of Hero Go Home live here.

Also, in case you haven't been following along, here's what you've missed so far:

Chapter 1: Skintight blue jeans and hovering don't mix.

Chapter 2: It helps if both ends of a conversation know the code. Also, there's a mission from God.

Chapter 3: Singing purple dinosaurs might still try to eat you.

Chapter 4: There's really no way to prove someone doesn't eat his own poop.

Chapter 5: Being a mascot isn't so bad, if you can blow stuff up.

Chapter 6: Stench and misery are part of the Digger mystique. Also, Yodaville.

Chapter 7: Secret identities suck almost as much as too much exposition. Didn't you know?

Chapter 8: Fighting supervillains isn't football or checkers or tic-tac-toe. Well, maybe Australian rules. What are the Australian rules for tic-tac-toe?

ETA: There's something else that's subtly different, as well, though if you haven't visited before, you won't notice. But you'll notice next week...

It's Alive!

Finally!

Counting Down - A Teaser

It's almost here...

Workout Supplements and Writing

Every now and again, I get on a workout kick. I just get tired of being out of shape and embark on about 90 days of hard workouts to get myself built back up again, after which I let things slide for a while (I would be on one now, if I had a job that allowed me to afford air conditioning).

What frustrated my wife about the kicks I would get on, though, was that I would invariably spend 50 bucks or more on protein powders and other supplements that she figured I didn't need.

And she was right. You can find plenty of articles attesting to the facts that...

• Supplement effects are overrated
• They can't compensate for a bad diet
• Their effect is likely to be minimal unless you're participating in very hard workouts
• There is no guarantee that the research behind them is solid or of the purity of their ingredients

I know these things. And yet, every time I enter a workout cycle, I go out and buy the stuff. Why? And what does this have to do with writing?

The reason why reveals perhaps my own weakness, and yet it's a weakness I'm at least aware I have and know how to exploit for my own benefit (at least short-term). The new object in my life gives me a talisman, a physical object that serves as a reminder of my goal and what I need to do to achieve that goal. And because it's new, I get the added motivation of learning something new and figuring out how to make it work for me. I get to play, and that helps keep me motivated.

I do that with books as well. I seem to approach every new book differently. Blue Falcon (as well as some of my earlier screenplays) was written mostly in longhand at bars, to the point where it got hard for me to write any other way, with a very basic outline outline written in Word. Angel Baby, aborted after 100 pages, was written in an office I rented. I think I also tried using a product called yWriter during this time, but didn't get very far with it.

Hero Go Home was outlined on note cards and mostly written at the same office, partly during Nanowrimo;. For the second draft, I noted the story's different locations on Google Earth. For a proposed sequel to Hero Go Home (which was to become Digger's Big Con, the aborted webcomic story that I need to finish someday) I made a lot of brainstorming notes on a website called KayudaMaps, which subsequently shut down, losing all the notes in the process.

Death Wave was outlined with a product called Anthemion Writer's Cafe. It was demo software, though, so I wasn't able to use its full capabilities.

So here we are on a third (and I hope, final) draft of Hero Go Home, and what have I done? Besides the chance to play with the layout of my website, I've downloaded two products to help me do what I have never done well before--outline the story. There's a product called Freemind, which is mind-mapping software that I'm using like the old KayudaMaps, only I don't have to worry about the website shutting down and dumping my data. And I'm using yWriter 5 to put meat on the bones.

I didn't like Freemind at first, but now I'm starting to get the hang of it and it's actually helping me figure out the flow of my story. It works with objects called nodes, which is a piece of text. Each node can have siblings and children. So I make a node for a scene, then sub-nodes for each beat of the scene, and if I have a specific piece of information I need to fit in, or if I have an idea for a great line of dialogue I want to have there, I can give it a sub-sub-node, and so on.

And each family of nodes is collapsible, so I can look at the overall flow of a story at a glance, but if I want more detail on a given scene (say, the one I'm writing at the moment, or one I want to foreshadow, or one I want to flash back to), I just open that node and the tree of sub-nodes under it pops open.

yWriter also, I didn't much like the last time I tried to use it. It was an earlier version, though, and it intimidated me with all the fields of information it wanted about characters and such. You build the book in chapters and scenes, and there are database-style fields for you to keep track of characters and locations and such, with space for detailed descriptions. You can even run reports that tell you how many scenes each character is in, or show it visually as a storyboard with a card for each scene on a timeline. The important thing is, I'm more comfortable with leaving as many fields blank as I want, only adding stuff as I go along and discover new things about the characters.

For some reason, I thought I was doing it wrong when I didn't know my characters inside and out when I started to write. But all of the standard methods of filling in backstory and doing character work ahead of time just make my eyes glaze over. It seemed as if I was doing a lot of extra work that I might never use and had little to do with the story I wanted to tell.

And while I am more comfortable now with doing character prep than I was, I am also learning to accept that I will never know my characters perfectly before I start writing. At some point in the writing process, I stop telling them what they're like, and they start telling me instead. It sounds like an artsy-fartsy cop-out, but it's true. Lisa--one of the main characters in Death Wave--was supposed to be a throwaway background character, but emerged to become a driving force in the story.

So will these products be the magic bullets that somehow fix what was wrong with the story in previous drafts? Doubtful. There's no guarantee that I'll have the patience to use them to their full capabilities, or that I will be able to somehow unlock new mental abilities thanks to their help.

But right now, they're helping me focus what were previously really unfocused efforts at revising the plotline, and I'm encouraged at the results. To be painfully honest here, a few days ago, I was really excited with the look of the new website, but very scared that I would have no idea where to go with the story once I got past the first couple of chapters that had already been written. I had serious flopsweat going, and I don't now.

I mean, I still don't know if the book will find an audience, but I'm much more confident that there will at least be a book. And a better book than before.

Progress Report 4 - The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

So yeah, now I'm pretty much just waiting for August 1 to roll around. It doesn't mean that I'm idle, goodness no.

I've got the first chapter uploaded already and scheduled to drop on Sunday morning. I've completed a couple of Extras, have another one or two in progress (which means I haven't yet decided to post it as one or two pieces). And I'm debating one big step which prudence tells me I should take, but fear tells me I should not.

I've gone through a lot of stress over the past couple of years, hit some real mental low points, and during that time, I put myself into a kind of self-imposed exile from a big part of my community of friends on-line, mainly the folks from hte Codex Writers Group. I've thought several times that I should end it and get back in touch; I miss those folks.

But fear stops me every time. For instance, when I found out that Ted Kosmatka was nominated for a Nebula, I wanted to congratulate him, but I haven't said a word to him in around two years and it just seemed weird. I ended up not saying anything. I did get the nerve up to contact Nancy Fulda and James Maxey (and by contact, I mean leave brief comments on their blogs), but it was hard, and I certainly don't have the balls to ask them to link to my site, especially sight unseen as far as the book goes.

Because let's face it, what I'm doing, it's risky. I've tried to write this book twice before and done a bad job of it. I have no guarantees that this attempt will turn out any better. The difference is, very few people saw how bad those previous attempts were. Now I'm doing it in front of the world, so to speak.

So I'm fearful and yet excited. Because I'm doing something new for me, and the work and creativity is fun. I sincerely hope people like it, and that it turns into more than just another site that's visited by about three friends. I hope I can do a good enough job of it that people will be anxious to visit and see the updates. I hope that it turns out good and stays fun.

Corinne Bohrer can't wait.


I didn't mean like that. No, um, you know what? Carry on, Corinne.

What to Expect

(This is cross-posting to both They Stole Frazier's Brain and Hero Go Home):

So just what can you expect now that I'm relaunching Hero Go Home?

Well, as long as I'm unemployed, expect a lot of content. I'm holding back right now, building up a reserve of things (and switching between projects means I've got a bunch of unfinished stuff floating around right now). And depending on what kind of job I get, that flow of content might not be greatly reduced (I applied for something very nice today that involves a lot of web work and a lot of content production, though not much creativity--it remains to be seen whether it will leave me too drained of enthusiasm to keep up with my own work, or leave me raring to go on stuff once I get home...assuming I get the job, of course, which is a long shot, but I really want this one).

So a typical week will look like this:

Tuesday: Classic Movie Review on examiner.com and a Hero Go Home Extra!

Wednesday: Big Game Wednesday on They Stole Frazier's Brain

Thursday: Classic Movie Review on examiner.com

Friday: A new Hero Go Home chapter

Saturday: Out of the Vault on They Stole Frazier's Brain (yes, it's coming back)

plus a trickle of smaller posts and links to stuff I like, which will probably appear on Hero Go Home. I don't do a lot of that here, because I've had this superstition about posting more than once per day, but I want people to visit Hero Go Home early and often, and one way to do that is to give them a steady flow of new stuff to see.

You may notice that Movie Monday is missing from this list. I actually want to start it up again as well, but I put a hell of a lot of time and work into those, and I don't know if this new schedule would allow me to do it justice. If I have the time and start gaining traffic, I may take the plunge. I have all the Superman films gathering dust, just waiting for a mega-series.

Progress Report 3 - Attention to Detail

The forum is set up. Not completely customized yet, but my attention is spread too thin to get too far into the weeds on learning the fine points of phpBB. But you can read and register and post, and if anybody does, then I'll worry about learning the finer points of the bulletin board software and board moderation.

I've got the sidebar set up with the Donate button, the RSS feed, and the ads for Daikaiju! 3 and the Cafepress shop. I need to come up with some more shirt designs. I have one based on "Double-Secret Weapon" that's about 90% done, and I have some vague ideas for some Hero Go Home ones.

One thing that happens every time I go through a relaunch or a redesign is I learn more about putting together websites. Often it's more a matter of catching up to technology that has passed me by. My first Geocities sites, I coded completely by hand, typing up HTML in Notepad. I used the cheap giveaway software that came with our camera to edit photos.

For Hero Go Home, I'm using Wordpress for the basic site, phpBB for the forum, FileZilla for uploading, GIMP and Inkscape to do graphics and photo editing, Open Office Writer to write the novel itself. I've got Google Analytics set up for traffic monitoring, Amazon Affiliate Program and Cafepress accounts, and a Paypal business account for the Donate button.

And the crazy thing is, this is a relatively simple, DIY site. I think it looks pretty good, but I could not go to a company tomorrow and say, "Hire me to be your webmaster. Look at my site to see what I can do." Fifteen years ago, I probably could have. The standards hadn't been set, and companies first getting into the web had very little understanding of what they wanted to get out of it, beyond "more business."

Not today. The bar is high, and I don't know a fraction of what I would need to know to be a corporate web admin today. It's yet one more skill set that I know just well enough to be a talented amateur.

Progress Report 2 - It's Official

So last night, after visiting Sargon and Naamah-Darling for yet another Bad Movie Night ("The Conqueror," if you're wondering), I came home and worked through the night on the Hero Go Home redesign. Naamah gave me some good input, and talking to her led me to put some of my other ideas into more focus. I created and reordered pages and finally got up the nerve to set up a forum as well.

I still have some polishing to do--redoing the blogroll, adding links to my CafePress shop and Amazon, and maybe slotting in some Google ads or something. But my main concern now is getting content lined up and ready to go for the official launch, which will be on Sunday, Aug 1.

Caroline Munro is excited.

Progress Report 1 - The New Hero Go Home Site

No concrete progress actually, although as a certain brilliant commentator once said, "We have one of our best men in there right now, stirring the pot!"

Which means that before I could do any actual updating of the site, I had to hunt up the logins and passwords, clean out the backlog of old spam comments that needed moderating, figure out what I want the site to look like, what features I want to implement, what programs I want to use to best implement them. And update the information on my paypal account for the Donation button. Which is what I've been doing. I think I can basically make do with Wordpress for almost everything, but I'll probably also add a forum page with phpbb in the naively optimistic belief that folks might show up to discuss things on it.

Meanwhile, I haven't yet done any writing on the book, but I have done some plotting. I have the first three chapters or so pretty much written already which gives me three weeks of content in the can, so I can conceivably leave any more actual writing on the back burner while I get everything else up and running.

The big stumbling block is graphic design. I like doing it, but there are some pages of additional content that I don't see myself having the time or energy to do myself between now and launch date (which is tentatively in about two weeks). And while I like the logo I've got now, I think for the novel (as opposed to a webcomic) the logo might be too comic-booky.

I know, a superhero novel, and I'm concerned that the logo is too comic-booky.

Oh yeah, and I can't find my camera, which I sort of need for some of the things I want to do.

The New Plan

No calls on any of the jobs I've applied for. Not one.

Not one call. Not one interview.

So I'm thinking it's time to go ahead and throw myself into a Hero Go Home redesign. I've paid for the domain for a few more months at least, so let's put it to work.

I'm looking at making all the published Digger stories so far available for download; don't know whether to try charging for them or go the "free, but please donate" route. Got to freshen up the graphics and page design. It's set up as a ComicPress page right now, but I may dump that for straight WordPress. I've got some other ideas for some entertaining content.

And then there's Hero Go Home, the novel. The first two drafts were good in places, but didn't hold together overall. I've seen other people do the serial novel concept, and I'm thinking I might give that a try. I'm putting all the game stuff on hold while I take one last plunge at plotting it out and seeing if I can make a run at it.

The reason I'm switching to this at such a late date is two-fold. Number one, I own the domain, so I better use it before I lose it. Number two, Digger is still my only real seller. There may be an audience for the Dieselpunk stuff I've been playing with lately, but I don't know that for sure. I know Digger can sell, at least some. And number three, of course, I need cash, at least enough to keep my utilities turned on. Desperation may spur the creative oomph that escaped me on the previous HGH drafts.

I'll still post here. This will never go completely away, I don't think. For instance, tomorrow I'll be posting up another examiner.com story, and then will come Big Game Wednesday. I'm into the Champions era now, and you may be able to tell that I look back fondly on my Champions days.

And in a couple of weeks, Big Game Wednesday is going to reach the origins of Digger in the game. Assuming I've got some stuff ready to roll out, that may coincide with the Hero Go Home relaunch. We'll see.

Going Under, a Little

I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails to the one-week buffer I had remaining on Hero Go Home. I should be able to hang on for another two weeks or so, but any disruption of my schedule will put me on hiatus. So I'm debating whether to go ahead and schedule a small break when my guys finally get to the hotel and start the next phase of the story.

Back when I first decided to launch the strip, Sandra Tayler, wife of Schlock Mercenary's Howard Tayler, advised me that consistency was the number one thing I could do to make the strip a success. "Don't miss updates" was the gist.

But I need to get some strips worked out ahead again. SO I have a few choices: struggle along as is and hope nothing unexpected ever happens, change the update frequency, change the artwork, or take a break and work ahead again. I'm already pushing the low-output limit with only three strips (not pages) a week. I could switch to black-and-white and save a ton of the time I spend on coloring, but that might be too drastic a change (plus my pen rendering isn't great--at least with color, I get a chance to cover some of my weaknesses).

So in a couple of weeks, I may be announcing a hiatus on the strip of at least one week, maybe more. The only upside to this is that, given the disruption in my schedule and my anticipating that this might happen, I haven't really made any efforts to publicize the strip, so there aren't a lot of readers to lose. If I take the break now, I'll have a stronger product when I do decide to advertise.

At least, that's where I'm leaning right now.