I figured I'd go less than ten days before I missed one.

I actually had an entry I was going to write here yesterday, and then didn't write it because I didn't have the energy for it just then, and like a lot of other things, once I got caught up in the after-dinner work, I didn't remember to do it. Two nights so far I've been "oh hell, it's almost midnight and I didn't post an entry," and squeaked by at eleven-something. That will happen many more times. I imagine I'll have quite a few more misses, too.

Yesterday was off-kilter anyway. I go out nearly every Friday and take the same walk and end up at the same restaurant and eat the same lunch (and it's a big lunch, because it comes at the end of a three-mile walk and it's usually neary two pm when I have it, and I don't really eat breakfast, so I'm pretty hungry), and it goes fine, but yesterday for some reason that big lunch sat in my stomach like a lump of lead. I didn't want to walk a little more after lunch like I sometimes do (admittedly, the weather did not encourage it anyway), I didn't really want to move, I wanted to get home and sit very still for a long time.

(Which I could not do, because I had to stop at the liquor store for some wine for cooking later this weekend, and then as soon as I got in I needed to go back out to pick up my prescription because I knew I would not want to go get it tomorrow -- today, as I type this -- because of impending snow, and the pharmacy sends you a testy message if you let the prescription sit there more than two days.)

Also, even though having things irritate my throat and nose constantly is a fact of life with me because I have the kind of acid reflux nobody knows about, the weird kind that doesn't give you heartburn, but instead manifests as "something's in my throat I can't get clear," yesterday was extra-special. Normally this sensation either passes shortly after I eat or I take some antacid tablets if I think it's coming on unusually strong, but yesterday something really got me and I coughed off and on for hours, so much so that it distracted me from trying to work. It probably hasn't helped that it's so dry in this house that my spouse has been coating herself in Eucerin every day and I've been waking up -- after a night in the hottest, driest room in the house with the door closed -- with my eyes having that sandblasted feeling.

Anyway, short story long, yesterday was more than unusually disrupted. I was such an exhausted coughing lump of lead that I skipped my dinner-making plans altogether and just ate some of the salami and cheese I'd bought for other things with some Triscuits. I didn't even have the customary 6:30 cocktail; I didn't feel up to it. I had a glass of the wine I bought. And then spent the rest of the night not doing enough renders.

The problem is -- and if you keep reading these entries as we march onward through time, you'll probably get used to hearing this refrain -- these days, at almost all times when I'm not running renders for the next story, I'm annoyed that I'm not running renders for the next story. It's a question of time. There is no good way to do the renders faster, and because waiting around on renders is the least interesting part of the process, I always want them to happen and be done as fast as possible.

This is one of the two reasons my comics-in-quotation-marks are not made from hand-drawn art. (The other reason is that I can't draw and I can't afford to pay an artist what they'd deserve.) As I say in About the Comics, if I just wrote a story, it would take two to three hours. (Really. If the fiction's flowing well I can write a five-to-eight-thousand-word story in an afternoon.) The renders take two to three weeks. If I hired an artist, to do a twenty-to-thirty-page comic, I would expect it to take two to three months. I don't have that kind of time. I have too many ideas to get out of my head before I die.

(Why not just write stories then, you ask? See the link above.)

The problem is that so many other things demand my time. Trivial, useless things like finding nutrition and placating screaming cats and earning a modest living and sleeping and shoveling fucking snow (3+ more inches today; I've already been out once as I write this, and will have to go out again, plus a third time to clear off the car tomorrow so it can be used on Monday). Life. Life gets in the way of my doing renders, is what I'm saying.

The spouse is out of town right now -- her yearly convention. She left before I woke up on Wednesday and will be back on Monday. I had very little work to do (I mean, the work they pay me for) on Wed-Fri, and today I should be looking at two solid days where I can do nothing but renders, right? That's the ideal. That's the dream.

But it doesn't work out that way ... including the half hour where I've diverted to type this entry because I don't want to find myself forgetting to do one and realizing it's eleven-forty-five at night and I'm fifteen minutes away from missing a day yet again.