Well, the past two months have been crazy for me. Sorry for not being around for you to deliver delicious comic goodness. Basically, I’ve been Universitying. It’s not an excuse — this is my life now. I’m a full-time student and we’re all just going to have to live with that. I know you don’t get this crap from Scott Kurtz. Kurtz updates every day. Well, Kurtz isn’t at University, is he? He’s doing his strip as a full time job. Do I want to do my comic as a full time job? Of course I do. I’d love to. Do I want to do it enough to drop out of University? No. This is just something I need to do. For the next three years I need to focus my attention primarily on my English degree. My full-time job is being a student with comic pushed back to a spare time thing. Of course, I don’t get a lot of spare time and I try to spend it with loved ones, friends and family. You know, have a life.
Sure, in the world of webcomics this is a lousy excuse. But in an English seminar, missing the deadline for an assessed essay “because the comic community was counting on me” is a lousier excuse. What am I trying to say? Life on the Fourth Floor isn’t dead. I’m on holiday now from the course and (even though I should be reading Great Expectations) I’m working on the 14-panel monster strip again. But that doesn’t mean Life on the Fourth Floor will be updating regularly for a while. It’s a question of work, organisation, balance and priorities. And I hate to put anything above the comic but some things just are. Such as:
- My girlfriend
- My family
- My friends
- My degree
- My book
That’s five balls being juggled. So I’ve dropped a couple of those balls over the past three months. I’m not going to say which ones but I will say that I feel awful every time one of those balls drops. For example, I love writing my book but I haven’t written any of it since summer. That kills me — it makes me feel like a failure and a hack, like I don’t deserve to call myself a writer. But until my situation changes I can’t write any more of the book — and I can’t work as often as I’d like on the comic either. And that kills me too because a cartoonist who does not update is no cartoonist at all.
Sorry for the long and pretty whiny post but I’m just setting the record straight for the next couple of months and that’s all I’m saying about my personal and academic life in relation to the strip until I finish the course or find a way to freeze time like Hiro.
Summary: no comic for now. Personal issues. Thanks for sticking around anyway and being so understanding — next update is coming as soon as humanly possible under the circumstances. From now on I’m just going to talk about how long the next comic will be and unless I specifically give another reason you can just go ahead and assume it’s taking so long because I am a full time English Literature student with six books to read in two weeks (on a good day).
Discussion ¬