September 08, 2002
I'd like to take just a moment to welcome all the new readers who joined us following the Labor Day newsbox. Welcome! I'm happy to have you along for the ride. I'm always pleased to hear from folks who enjoy Schlock Mercenary, and it amazes me that there are people out there who can sit down and read it from the beginning (in one sitting, as some people have claimed to have done).The server logs show an interesting trend. Fewer than a third of the people who page all the way back to the first day make it through the first week. This nicely reinforces my low opinion of the early artwork. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about it, unless I can find the time to re-draw 9 months or more of strips. Considering that drawing them the FIRST time around took me, oh, about 9 months, I'm not sure I'm up to that this week.
(Strictly speaking, I don't think I'm up to ANYTHING strenuous this week. I hate insomnia, and have had a whole lot of it for the last four nights running. Saturday I took four naps in an effort to catch up (one nap for each night of sleep I was missing), but I suspect I'm still in sleep deficit mode. Here's hoping I can catch a few thousand zees between now and Sunday.)
The good news is that I made a scripting breakthrough. Schlocktoberfest 2002 promises to be frightening, revelatory, and exciting -- in some cases all at the same time. But you'll all have to wait nearly a month for that stuff. The current story has hardly begun...