Journal

Oh, the stress…

14 Comments

I’m looking at my calendar… sadly, I appear to have frittered away too much precious time of late. If I crank a full week of comics this week, then when I get back from Joberg at the end of NEXT week I’ll be down to 14. I’ll then have about five days to crank another week’s worth before family vacation.

Assuming I don’t come down the mountain to work on the strip, I’ll wrap the family vacation with ONE week left in the buffer…

In the week following family vacation, assuming I draw a week’s worth of strips, I’ll be in BIG TROUBLE. See, I then leave for Hague, and that would mean that when I return, the buffer will be at ZERO.

What needs to happen is this:
1) I need to script two or more weeks this week, draw one, and color three.
2) during the week before and the week OF family vacation I need to crank out three weeks of strips — scripts, coloring, the works.
3) During the week AFTER family vacation, I need to push out a week of strips.

That way I can return from Hague with two weeks in the buffer, and with a whole MONTH of “no travel” to build it back up in anticipation of August-September-October, when we do the crazy schedule thing again.

*sigh*

The only problem with this plan is that during this same time period there is an enormous project under way at work, in which I’m the principal driver, and my job is to prioritize, revise, and farm out the work described in about 400 pages of 10-point font.

–Howard

14 thoughts on “Oh, the stress…”

  3. Howard, don’t kill yourself trying to keep the strip on schedule. If you have to take a week or so of hiatus on the strip, take a hiatus on the strip. We’d much sooner have our comics delayed and our author rested than our comics on time and our author stressed-out.

    1. Hiatus would kill me. The comic keeps me sane, but it is a harsh master. If I fail to do its bidding, it not only fails to keep me sane, it will abandon me completely.

      In short, I fear that if I take a hiatus, I’ll never come back.

      –Howard

      2. I understand how things can be like that. I’ll just burn some joss (metaphorically speaking) for the Universe to cut you some slack.

      3. I think all we can hope now is that you get some free time, the gift of ‘drawing like the wind’, and maybe a bit of prayer. I’ve lost projects like that, when I put them down for a bit, only to find they don’t come back. :/

      4. Eep!

        OK, no hiatus for you, then. 🙂

        (Really? Never come back? I used to think that if I didn’t stick to my schedule for writing my book, I’d stop entirely, but it turned out I was wrong. I keep going. Go fig.)

        Anyway, the way you bear up under pressure never ceases to amaze me. Under a quarter of your workload, I give up all creative endeavors entirely. Fortunately for me, my actual job involves no travel and I have no kids, so I putter about with this and that. The prospect of doing (much less COLORING!) a daily strip still daunts me tremendously, though.

        Anyway: we’re all pulling for you! Go, Mr. Tayler, go! Rahrahrah! 😀

  4. Danger Will Robinson ! Danger Danger!

    Yeesh, I dunno why they tell us geeks to get a life, most of us seem to have more than enough of one for any two people!

    IOW, sympathy extended, you’re not the only one to find out that sleep might not be on the schedule anytime soon.

  5. Don’t sweat it

    Howard,
    You’ve done a wonderful job of keeping your buffer way up and ahead in the past. We all know how stressful life and work can be and how they can interfere with sanity projects.
    If the buffer gets a little low, don’t worry about it. Just do what you can to stay sane while staying healthy. We trust you to do what you need to do.
    Thanks and good luck!

    Storm

  6. So, what about those TPS reports? We’re gonna need you to come in..um…Sunday.

    You could always step back a tiny bit and do an arc in black and white, y’know. We’d understand.

  7. Hey, you should do a fan art week. Not a week where you do nothing with the comic and risk forgetting to pick it back up, but a week where you post the seven best submissions and put them on the page. You won’t be taking a week off as much as having a week of comics that doesn’t eat into your buffer. (And you can of course use that week as a break too if you need.) That way you don’t have to spend as much of your family vacation drawing because you won’t need as many strips to cover the given number of days.
    Good luck, whatever you do man. Love the comic.

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