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July 4th
Happy Independence Day, to those readers who celebrate it.
Not a lot has changed in the last half year, but I do have good news and bad news... and bad news.
The (sorta) good news is that I've finally been given a semi-firm date for my layoff: 30 days after conversion,
The bad news is that the conversion date has been moved back a month, from September to October 7th.
(It's almost satirical that the contractor the company is hiring to save money is a month behind schedule before they've even taken over our duties. The phrase "You get what you pay for" comes to mind...)
The other bad news is that I won't be able to restart the comic immediately after my job ends. I've had to defer a lot of things due to my time deficit, and I'll be playing "catch up" for a while.
The bottom line is, it doesn't look like I'll be making Aahz's prediction of an October 1st resumption come true. Sorry, folks.
January 1st
Happy New Year! I hope 2007 will be good to you.
I'm not big on blogging, but I suppose this will read like a blog entry. That can't be helped; I need to bring everyone up to date on what's going on.
First of all, I want to express my sincere appreciation to those of you who have been hanging in there... I really appreciate it.
Conversely, to those few of you who have declared the comic dead: Pfft!
No, the comic is not dead. But after four years of never missing a scheduled update and managing a number of specials, it's suffering through a forced and nonconsensual hiatus.
And here's where I get all "bloggy," because I have to delve into my personal life a little to explain what's going on.
After 13 years with the same company (good thing I'm not superstitious!), I'm being laid off. (Not just me; our entire IT division is being outsourced.) Due to a long conversion period between our current systems and the contractor's, most of us were fortunate enough to get a year and a half's advance notice -- my job is scheduled to end this September.
Of course as soon as they told us about our pending demise I started thinking about what comes next. I decided it was time to be my own boss again -- something I've done several times during my career. Sadly, I can't make a living off of the girls (oh how I wish!), but I put some other irons in the fire and things have been going well.
Too well, in fact. I'd planned to take on just enough work to handle in one day a week, bank that income over the remaining time with my current employer, and then use it to expand rapidly once my current job ends. But I've been getting a lot of inquiries and requests, and due to circumstances I really need to support them now if I can -- the opportunities will sour if I make them wait until September. I've been trying to hold the expansion down to a bare minimum, but it's a delicate balancing act.
So over last Summer my free time dwindled, then disappeared. By last Fall I had more to do than time in which to do it, and I had to begin skipping things. Like sleep, sometimes. And forget "leisure time" activities! (You should see the state of our home... anyone want a job as a fetish house slave? Heh.) But the girls are important to me, and they stayed high on the "to do" list.
If you were paying attention you saw signs of the problem. The Forum died when my ISP did an upgrade, but I never had a chance to dig in and diagnose the problem. Then the damaged Forum got hacked and -- lacking time to work on it -- I had to take it down altogether. (Yes, it's coming back when I have the time.) And I've always tried to update at midnight on the start of a strip's publication date. But as time got tighter and tighter the strip was published later and later in the day, sometimes just barely making it under the next midnight wire.
I was still hanging in there until my computer's power supply went out, frying the motherboard in the process. Due to a total lack of available time, it took me literally months to get a replacement machine up and running and mostly functional (I still don't have my pressure-sensitive brushes working). Thanks, by the way, to all the folks who offered to send me money, a replacement power supply, a replacement computer... you have no idea how much that meant to me. I didn't take anyone up on anything because what I really need -- time -- can't be packaged up and mailed.
It turns out that being told that you're losing your job a year and a half before it happens is both a blessing and a curse. Yeah, I got time to think about what comes next... but so did everyone else. I'm one of only three people who understand how some of our online production systems work. One of them found a new job and left within a month of the layoff announcement. The other left at the end of the year. So now any time anything goes wrong with the production systems, guess who's getting called. (And that's already started: I'm not on call this week, but there was a problem this morning, New Year's Day, and my phone started ringing.)
It's said, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." I'm gonna be like Arnold Schwarzenfreakinegger before this is all over...
Folks, I want the strip to continue. It's making me nuts for it to be on hold like this. (Besides the general frustration and disappointment, the current storyline was headed towards a convergence with a big event next year, and I don't know if I'll be able to sync it up now.) But I literally have no choice. I'm barely hanging on as it is (actually, I'm slowly backsliding). I'm lining up some things that may help but I don't know how well they'll pan out.
Aahz jokingly posted that I didn't want to upset the publication schedule, and I was going to resume the strip on October 1st so the dates would line up. I'd hate for that to come true, but that is sort of the worst case: When my current job ends I'll have quite a bit of available time until the business spins up enough to fill each week. But let's all hope for a much earlier resumption!
Understand: I don't want to be like some Webcomic authors who have an unpredictable publication schedule. I would rather wait until I can resume things reliably than put up a comic here, a comic there, another comic in two months. You folks deserve better than that. When the strip comes back it will be with every belief that it's back for real and with a schedule I can sustain.
I wish I had better news for you. Heck, I wish I had better news for me! You're missing a comic you enjoy, but I'm living this nutso life! :o)
Wish me luck!
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Schedule: Savvie and Lacey began life as a monthly strip. In September of 2002 (the comic's first anniversary) it went semi-monthly, and now publishes on or around the 1st and 15th with occasional specials (e.g., the strip went weekly for December, 2002).