Reality Amuck™

Note: This may be a little long and boring but it's being posted for my own archival purposes. Feel free to read it, but it won't hurt my feelings if you don't. It's more for the people who are asking, "What's up? Where's the comic?"

First I want to say, "Thanks" to everyone that stops by and reads the comic. You are all awesome and I really appreciate it. If you've been reading for a while you may have noticed that the site looks a little different (unless you're just reading this in the RSS feed, in which case you should really drop by the site and check it out. The changes were the result of an unexpected site crash. Due to my web building skills being allowed to sit rather dormant for the past few years (or more); I made a few mistakes and what was supposed to be a simple upgrade of the background mechanics of the site became a complete rebuild. It wasn't a total loss. During the rebuilding process I picked up a few new tricks, learned a thing or two about CSS and was able to clean out the databases, getting rid of almost a meg and a half of redundant files.

But due to the fact that I spent most of the early part of the redesign process flailing around and the remainder of the time slowly learning how to "make it go", I spent far too much time on this process. Precious time I should have been using to draw comics. The result was that I missed Wednesday and Friday's updates last week, right in the middle of a story arc. When I finished battling the site I immediately started on the missing comics. They're up in the archive where they belong but here it is Friday again. Working on the late strip (and a couple doctor's visits) ate up the time that I should have been using to make this week's comics.

So, I have a choice. I can keep playing "catch-up" and eventually finish the strips for this week in the archive, while also racing to finish next week's comics, or we can call this week a wash and start fresh next week.  Calling it a wash seems to be what I'm leaning toward doing. In preparation for this post I looked back at the archive page. Wednesday, November 4th was the first day that started posting comics as a full-time job. Since then I have missed 8 strips. That's an 84% success rate, but it's also a 16% fail rate. I think this is unacceptable. It's a little late for New Year's Resolutions, but here's one that I'm making, by November 4, 2010 I want that to be at least a 95% success rate. Sure, I could promise, "Let's go for 100%" and honestly that's what I'm shooting for, but I'm also a realist.

My job, literally, is to provide you with consistent updates, with my best possible work, three days a week. Obviously I'm failing to do that and that's unacceptable to me. I'm going to take some time this weekend and try to work ahead a little. I'm also working with a new coloring technique that should improve the strips look some and I've started serious work on getting the Book ready for print by this fall.

Together, we will make this fun and successful.

-Tovias