On 17 May, 2010, Rik wrote:

So, I owe you guys a little bit of an apology. My update schedule has been horribly wonky the last couple of weeks, with very little explanation. There are actually a couple of reasons.

The first of these is that, quite simply, I've been horribly busy. First there was a two-week period in which my band had three gigs (one of them a 2-hour affair which we only had two weeks to prepare for), while I had to keep track of the UK election (a disappointment and a farce, IMO) and attend a three-day research skills workshop, all on top of needing to write a 3000-word paper in time for last Friday. Now, I have to prepare a presentation of that paper for Thursday and then expand the paper to ~8000 words to form a chapter of my thesis in time for mid-June (I also have to dredge up another ~8000 words on a related topic from somewhere), as well as take care of some final hoop-jumping for my first year skills program (a mandatory but mainly tedious and useless part of my PhD program). Fortunately, the band is now essentially on hiatus for a month because our guitarist has finals and then our frontman is on holiday, and I've finished work for the summer, which means that while money is tight, I do have more time to work on stuff, including the comic.

The second issue is that recently, I've had some very bad writer's block set in, particularly for this chapter (number 24). My plan said very little besides what Mike says in today's strip ('Dudes (in Beijing) getting drunk and waking up as cat-people') - in fact for a long time, it didn't even have a good idea for the chapter, just that something had to happen involving alcohol and Beijing - and I really didn't know where to go with the story for this and the next chapter (chapter 26 is, for various reasons, already shaping up nicely). Fortunately, a lot of things finally fell into place this morning, so I should have banished this particular gremlin once more. That said, my hayfever has just kicked in in a big way, so my actual working is likely to be a bit more disrupted than it has been through the winter.

My point is, basically, that I have had at least a half-decent excuse for missing a couple of updates. I'm sorry to have done so, because I've been doing so well of late, but it's been all but unavoidable. The kicker is, though, that I will be making the dropped updates up. When I started chapter 21 last November, I very carefully divided up the year into six equal chunks so that the climax of chapter 26 would fall in the middle of the Halloween Cameo Caper (this should give you some idea what's going to happen, I hope). That gave each chapter 25 pages plus a title page, and I intend to stick to that plan. That means I *will* make the (currently 2) dropped updates up to you all, probably sometime later this month. I'll make sure to signpost it well when I do so people don't inadvertantly miss them.

Again, I'm sorry to have dropped some updates. Things are slowly coming back under control, and I will make the deficit up (something I don't think my government is going to have much luck with...)