Hey! The winners of the Daily Distress tabloid contest are just in! Congratulations to these clever people, and massive waves of gratitude to everyone who contributed ads and articles.

Here are the winning submissions:

Andrew Burday, for his “review” of the Essential DTWOF
Anna Beek, for her Peace Rally story
Liza Cowan, for her Lentille D’Or ad
Michael Fahy for his Earthly Paradise drycleaning ad
Jesse Nachem, for “The Chop Shop” profile of Miko
Rebecca Wire, for her same-sex marriage piece
Ellen Orleans for her Betsy Gilhooley story
June Thomas for her La Lentille D’Oh! Feature
Elaine Richards, for her Lentille D’Or review
Helene Newberg for her Middle School Hackers piece
Susan E. Brown for her Bounders/Miko ad AND Buffalo Lake State College ads
Kellan Baker, for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
Kassie Schwan for the Frosted Fruit Bats ad.

The winners get original art for a DTWOF episode, a copy of The Essential DTWOF, and a copy of The Daily Distress, which will be a 4 page tabloid.

Everyone else who contributed will get a copy of the book and the tabloid. Katie will be in touch with everyone in the next month or two about the tabloid, for your addresses and such. The book won’t be out till the fall, but we’ll make sure you get that too.

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

With all this fuss about the California Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the ban on same-sex marriage, I can’t help but reminisce about my own marriage in San Francisco four years ago. And its subsequent annulment three and a half years ago by that same Supreme Court. Hmm. I just emailed my now ex-partner Amy to ask her if we need to get a divorce. She says no.

DTWOF is going into hibernation. Or estivation, at any rate. But this blog, as long as you’ll have it, is wide awake. So don’t go anywhere else to procrastinate, okay?

I know that without the glue of the ongoing comic strip, your patience for my wildlife videos and autobiographical maundering might grow short. But I plan to keep posting these things.

Here are other ideas for what might go on here:

• A fan-fic corner…perhaps a page where people can post their stories and/or cartoons about what they think the characters might be up to during my hiatus.
• Lost DTWOF stories. I might start posting, in small doses, the accumulated “novellas” from my various DTWOF books. These won’t be included in The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, which is coming out this fall. So the website is a way to preserve them.
• Perhaps updates on my process as I work on my next memoir, Love Life: A Case Study. Or maybe not, I’m not sure yet whether that would help or hinder things.
• More contests and crap!

I hope to put up an official sort of mission statement or something for the blog/site. Actually, I’ve been meaning to do that for years now, to explain what the hell it is, for newcomers. I’ll get around to it.

But let me say one thing now: I’m more than happy to return any donations, or partial donations, made within the last year. I considered these as payment for reading the strip online, so it seems like a ripoff to just stop putting up new strips. Many people have posted to say no, no, don’t be ridiculous, keep the money. I appreciate that, and will put that dough back into the site–there’s a big update coming shortly. But while it would be a time-consuming project to prorate and return money to everyone who’s contributed, it’s eminently do-able to return funds upon request, and I’m happy to do it. So please don’t hesitate to ask. No problem.

Okay, here it is. The last episode for who knows how long. Nuthin’ fancy. No loose ends tied up. Just another strip.

As for the fan-fic thing, I just had some vague ideas about it. One was that it would be something we could somehow host on this site. (Dr. E, thanks for your thoughts about the copyright issue…that hadn’t occurred to me and I’ll have to think about it some more.)  I know people would take the story off in all kinds of directions, but I was thinking that, at the point when I resume the strip, I could decide which, if any, of the fan-fic plots were things that really happened. But again, I haven’t really thought this through.

Anyhow. I’ll get back to work. It’s taking me a little longer than usual because, in my compulsive, self-archiving way, I’m shooting video of the process. Since it’s the last strip for a while, and all.

This was touched off by my whiny video apologizing for not having the next strip done on time.

But it’s weird, because I’ve had a thought gestating about fan-fic. As one small module of a much larger thought I’ve been having about taking an official sabbatical from the strip. I’ve been mulling this over for weeks now, weighing the pros and cons, alternating between panic and relief, but I think I’m really gonna do it.

I also expected that I would make a coherent, carefully worded post about all my reasons instead of this kind of half-assed one. But it’s a big topic, and I expect I’ll be continuing to discuss it in many upcoming posts.

I haven’t even announced this to my newspapers yet. But here’s the rough outline of my plan.

I’m going to take an unspecified amount of time off from the strip so I can get my next memoir [Love Life: A Case Study] written and drawn by the fall 2009 deadline. It’s absolutely terrifying to me to consider this–I’ve been doing DTWOF at regular intervals since I was 23, and it’s become a sort of autonomic bodily function, always going on. Also, it seems crazy to give up a source of income, but the sad truth is, my income from the strip has taken a steep dive over the past couple of years. So it doesn’t represent as big a financial strain as it would have in the past. I’ve been losing lots of newspapers, and a disturbing proportion of the ones I still have are having trouble paying.
I’ve got one more episode in the hopper, #527. I’ll get it up next week. Interestingly, it’s about Sydney going on sabbatical. I find that if I think of my own break as a sabbatical—time off from one job to focus intensely (and temporarily) on another—it makes the idea of stopping more bearable.

There are all sorts of other things to consider–there are a bunch of people who’ve made contributions to the site, payment for reading the strip here regularly. I’ll figure out how to do pro-rated refunds to everyone.

I totally want to keep the blog going, if that’s possible. I guess we’ll see if it continues to hold peoples’ interest. One idea I had toward this end was to open it up to you guys, to having people write or draw stories about what the characters might be up to during my hiatus. I know the novelty of that might wear off soon, but it seemed like an interesting possibility. I guess we’ll see how it all evolves.

For now, here’s an awesome strip submitted by Tana Ford. Also, interestingly, on the theme of vacations.

People took the substitute cartoonist thing very seriously! Here’s an amazing submission by Iara. She revived Raffi’s old daycare provider, who appeared once, in 1997, and aged her perfectly! Also, I love her in-depth exploration of the oedipal dynamics at work in Sparrow, Stu & JR’s little family unit. Scroll down for Kassie’s “Arachnids To Watch Out For,” and Aunt Soozie’s kid’s delightful “Stick.” My favorite line: “This is so not art club.”

See below for the text to “Stick” in case you can’t make it out.

STICK
“The last finishing touches… and tada!”

“Wow, that’s really good. You should take an art class.”

“Gosh, thanks.”

Stick girl recommends an art club to stick boy….
“Where is it?”

“Okay, this is so not art club!”
(cat club)

“Ewww this isn’t it either”
(spinach club)

“Sorry Stickboy, class is all filled up”
(art club)

The End

Actually, he’s very heavy. Heavy industrial metal. This is me with my little brother John Saturday in Montreal, in one of Ministry’s tour buses. John’s playing keyboards with the band on their last tour, and I went up for the concert. He’s played with a lot of wild bands over the years–Killing Joke, Prong, Fear Factory, but I’ve never gone to any of his shows, which I feel bad about.

Well, I went to one show of another band he was in where they played actual industrial music–circular saws and things like that. That was pretty intense, but Ministry was WILD. John warned me to bring earplugs, but even so the music was bone-rattling. Hundreds of rambunctious young men in black all aswarm in a big crazy mosh pit. Fortunately there was a balcony from which I could watch the proceedings, but it was bouncing and swaying with the violent beat in a rather alarming manner.

John took me and Holly onto the stage while they were setting up.

Here’s John trying to explain to me for the thousandth time exactly what it is that he does.

The keyboard is all set up to play samples of weird music and sounds and stuff that he has to hit at the exact precise moment during the performance.

After the concert we went backstage and hung for a little bit with the band. Is that the unlikeliest thing a middle-aged lesbian could possibly do? Holly actually chatted with the legendary deviant psychotic bad boy Al Jorgensen about his garden.

Yesterday my hair was getting really long, so my friend the moose thought perhaps she could cut it. She cuts her own hair, and it works out okay. So I figured what the hell.

What the hell indeed. We were going to go out last night, so at 6pm she got out her clippers. Things began well enough.

But after a while, it got pretty hairy.

At 7pm, prospects were looking bleak so I put in a call to my regular barber, who was just about to close, but I told him it was an emergency, and he fit me in. By 8:00 I looked okay again.

And NLC just submitted this staggeringly brilliant one, in keeping with the zen theme. Dang, I wish I’d thought of it.