I feel like every Monday I'm making excuses for why the Sunday Unshelved still isn't up. And that's because it usually isn't. And the larger reason is this: I have a family, a job, and a comic strip, and I really only have time for about 2.5 of those 3 things. And since I enjoy both paying my mortgage and living with my children, the comic strip tends to come last.

The long-term strategy for fixing this is to either quit my day job or to go significantly part-time. I can't yet predict if or when that would happen. It is most predicated on consistently strong sales of our books and merchandise, plus a full advertising calendar.

The medium-term strategy is to delegate all the non-strip activities to others. I am slowly doing this - two years ago I did all our customer support and Gene all our fulfillment. Now Jana does it all for us. And our man Jim (all our employees must have names starting with "J") is handling some other operational responsibilities. Annoyingly, delegation itself takes time. And I have to avoid the temptation to add new items to my workload when I take old items off it. For instance, shortly after hiring Jana we started the Unshelved Book Club which was a great thing but added 2-4 hours of drawing to every week. And somethings are extremely expensive to delegage - I write (and run) our website because we can't afford to pay someone else to.

Message: I love and am committed to Unshelved. I devote as much time as I can to it. But that isn't always as much as it needs. I'm working to change things, but it will take time. I thank you (and Gene) for your patience.