Take a handful of semisolid hogfat. Mix in some of that banana granola that wasn’t very good. Stick it in the birdfeeder, and presto! Hours of fun for all concerned.

As part of my debilitating self-archiving disorder, I made a little documentary while I was working on the last DTWOF strip, the final one before my sabbatical. I boiled two full days of work down to twelve minutes, but that’s still too big for YouTube, so I split it into two sections. Here’s Part One. And here’s Part Two.

Do I really expect anyone to give up twelve minutes of their life to watch me fret about my work? Don’t I have a therapist for that? Yes, I do. And perhaps you could do something useful while you watch it, like pet the cat or clip your toenails.

My plan is to do this for one year. I feel really bad about it for many reasons, not the least of which is that people have made donations to the site based on the expectation of a new strip every two weeks. So first let me just say that anyone who wants a refund, just let me know. I think it’s pretty easy to do via PayPal. Alternatively, if you’ve made donation for a year, you could just consider now that it’ll cover two years.

The reason I’m doing this is that I have to crank out a new memoir by 2009. I just signed a contract for it. (MLK, thank you for raising the very interesting question a while ago about the difference between writing without a contract, and with one. I’ll get to that in a minute.) As many of you know, Fun Home took me seven years to complete. And most of those were spent quietly and reclusively at home, not galavanting around the country (and beyond) yammering about myself to all and sundry, like I’ve been doing for the past year.

I have more travel coming up soon, for my paperback tour. But even without the time on the road, I need to make some kind of change if I have any hope of getting this new book done on schedule. I don’t want to stop doing Dykes. That doesn’t make any sense. I love doing the strip, and it’s extremely important to me on so many levels that I can’t even enumerate them. Cutting back to one strip per month seems like a good compromise if people are willing to hang in there with me. I can keep the story going, but I can also slow down the crazy juggernaut that my life has become lately, and have some time to think.

This decision has been brewing for a while, and it feels somehow tied up with the blogsistential crisis and the email problem I was whining about recently. I’ve had a very intense year. And I’ve been managing the massive increase in stimuli pretty well, I think, for an introvert. But I may be nearing my limit. Oh, also, I have this other stuff going on. Fun Home, The Musical, of all things. (I’ll post about that some other time.) And possibly a big compendium of Dykes strips that I’ll have to edit.

But the main thing is, I’m trying to calm my life down so that I can work on this new book. Uh…did I mention my new book before this post? I think maybe someone else did. (Uh oh. I’m losing the ability to distinguish between myself and the people on the blog…that can’t be good.) It’s another memoir. Houghton Mifflin’s going to publish it. It’s called Love Life. It’s about…uh…my love life, I guess. But other stuff too. I can’t really talk about it yet. And MLK, the answer is, it’s rather daunting writing a book when you already have a contract. I worked on Fun Home for years before I sold it. It wasn’t like I had a choice–but it did feel important to not have anyone expecting anything from me. Yet I’m kind of savoring the pressure I have to produce this new book.

Anyhow. I just wanted to let you know about the new DTWOF plan. Y’know, the other thing is, lately I just haven’t been able to put the same kind of care and effort and research into the strip that I would like. So I think slowing down a bit will prevent me from getting hopelessly slipshod. I really hope this will work for everyone. I don’t know, I guess we’ll see.

Hey, go buy some books from Women and Children First and help one of the last women’s bookstores in the country to stay open. Here’s Linda and Ann, the owners. How can you resist? Here’s an article about how the store’s struggling and needs more support. They have a good website, I just ordered a couple books I’ve been wanting.

My flight from Miami to Philadelphia got rerouted today. To Charlotte, NC. Where I have taken up residence in a hotel. There’s apparently some sort of weather event that has shut down the entire eastern seaboard. I keep calling US Airways to rebook but I just get a busy signal, I can’t even get put on hold.

Charlotte is quite lovely, though. I guess I might as well be here as anywhere. Does it really matter as long as I have my laptop and wifi? I’m feeling very virtual.

On a strange note, as I was leaving the Charlotte airport this afternoon, Dorothy Allison was being paged over the loudspeaker.

2. I don’t mean to be tiresome, but speaking of awards, I just found out Fun Home has been nominated for a Lambda Book Award.

3. Here’s an interview I did with Bookslut, while I was at the Comic Con last week.

4. Here’s a picture of me at the NBCC reading on Wednesday night. Thanks to Lori McFadden of the Strand Bookstore for sending it to me. Oh, and thanks to cybercita for coming to the reading! Isn’t it cool seeing that giant drawing of my dad looming behind me?

5. I missed Town Meeting Day in Vermont because I’ve been away from home for a long time. But I just learned that nearly thirty towns passed a resolution calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney for misleading the country into war.

6. In the past two weeks I attended four panels at the New York Comic Con, visited Franklin and Marshall College to talk about my work, spent a week with my mom, then returned to NYC for this awards hoopla. Monday I go to Middlebury College, and Tuesday I fly to Florida for three days to do a bunch of classes and things at Miami Dade College. Somehow between this morning and Sunday night I have to drive home to VT, do my laundry, pack it up again, and, oh–produce two comic strips. I wonder how that’s going to happen.

But it’s not just because I’m busy that I haven’t been posting as much. There are a couple reasons, and if I wait to write them out in a coherent essay I’ll never do it, so here goes. (It’s a blog, after all.) Mainly, I’ve been feeling disturbed by my own need for attention. It’s incredibly seductive to post a cartoon about my life, and start getting almost instant responses to it. But the gratification that I get from it is fleeting and insubstantial. And related to that, I feel like the blog siphons off some vital autobiographical energy that I could be using more productively, or at least in a more considered way.

So that’s what’s going on. I feel bad about it, too, because it’s like we’re in a conversation, and it seems rude to just disappear. But I had to for a while. And I expect I’ll have to disappear more in the future if I ever want to write another book. Which I do.

But here, in the meantime, is a movie I made about another bug in my bathroom. I’ve been reading a book of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writing, and in the introduction there’s a discussion about the autobiographical roots of her fiction, with a list of examples. Then comes this passage: “The extent to which the most minor details in Virginia Woolf’s fiction were drawn from specific experiences is perhaps less well known. The story of her father throwing the flower pot at his mother, whether apocryphal or not, is clearly the prototype for the incident in which Mr Ramsay ‘finding an earwig in his milk at breakfast had sent the whole thing flying through the air on to the terrace outside.’”

I’m actually feeling pretty good today, but it’s time to knuckle down to work. And daunted as I felt by the prospect of having to write episode #500 in November, that was nothing compared to what I’m feeling as I face #502. This will be the first strip I’ve written without Julia’s assistance since #64. What if my drawing and writing skills regress to this primitive level?

Or worse, what if I can’t do it at all? I know, I know. I’ll be okay. But I always felt like Julia was my muse—not in the sense that she inspired my work, but in the way that she literally oversaw it. She was just always there as I plodded away. On my lap, weighing down my arm as I was trying to type. Insinuating herself right onto my drawing board and threatening to smudge the fresh ink with her tail. Pulling up the masking tape that sticks my paper to the board with her teeth and trying to eat it. Demanding that I stop already and go out for a walk with her.

Uhh…now that I think about it, maybe things will go a little more quickly in her absence.

I got Julia a year before I quit my day job to be a full-time cartoonist. And until quite recently, with Fun Home’s success, I lived in some degree of fear that I’d have to go back to having a day job. So I feel like she has seen me through this phase of my career–and in fact, on to the next. I spent the last couple of weeks on a kind of retreat, huddled up with her and working intensely on the proposal for my next book, another memoir. I was almost done with it on Tuesday afternoon when her symptoms began.

(Don’t worry. Soon I will tire of the PhotoBooth feature on my new computer.)

I’m struggling to remember my former life. Fortunately I have these pictures. Here’s my co-panelist Jessica Abel. (Um, great shot.)

And here are my co-panelists Lauren Weinstein and Gabrielle Bell.

Here’s the top of Jessica’s head in a panel of Gabrielle’s mesmerizing story, “My Affliction.”

If you don’t know their work already, check it out. It was really energizing to hang out with these younger cartoonists. They’re so smart. They know stuff about cartooning that I either don’t know, or have only arrived at after years of muddling along on my own. After the panel, an audience member observed that no one had asked us the perennial question “why aren’t there more women cartoonists.” And we were all glad that it hadn’t come up. It was nice to just talk about the work itself.

Here’s a sampling of the devices I unhooked and dusted off, my own personal electronics warehouse. What the hell are all these freakin’ things?

After. Ahhhh.

That made me feel so good, I also put down fresh duct tape on my splintering plywood floor.