Gentle reader…

December 16th, 2006

Here I am Thursday, facing my staggering workload. And here I am today, after having decided to send out re-runs of my comic strip this month.

It’s the third deadline I’ve missed this year. I feel pretty bad about it for many reasons.

1.) I only feel like I deserve to live if I’m actively producing work.
2.) Remember that episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show where we learned that Ted had never taken a vacation? He was terrified he’d get fired once the network saw how smoothly things went without him.
3.) You guys just chipped in all those donations to the website, and now I’m stiffing you two episodes.

But Wednesday evening I received an email from a reader entitled “your sabbatical.” I opened it in a panic, assuming it was someone telling me the strip had been getting stale so I should give it a rest. This person was, in fact, telling me to give it a rest, but she didn’t mention anything about staleness, just suggested that a little time off might be rejuvenating. I think my haggard Family Zone photographs alarmed her.

So I mulled over her message for a day or so, and decided she was right. I’m well and truly fried to a crisp. I have a billion things to do. They’ve just been piling up all year while I’ve been flying hither and yon promoting Fun Home. Already I’ve had time to get a much-needed haircut. And a Christmas tree. And to install SpamSieve, which has caught 80 of those @#&*$ penny stock emails in the past 24 hours. Even without the spam, my email inbox is utterly out of control.

Plus I just found out I’ve been invited to the Angoulême International Comics Festival in January. This is great, a really huge honor. But it means another big intercontinental schlep that I hadn’t accounted for in my schedule. Lewis Trondheim is winning the Grand Prix this year. Here’s what his Lambiek page says:

Lewis Trondheim is one of the most prolific authors of his generation, and has published more than thirty-five books in a period of ten years.

Fuck. Maybe I better crank out those strips after all.