It's with no small trepidation that I look at my handwritten numbers scribbled on the Dreamwave Transformers calendar hanging on my wall. Today is the 17th. In red pen, on that square are the following cryptic notes:

GM 150
TA 42
SR 8

What does that mean? They're annotations as to which webstrips are running today. GM is the seemingly endless Gambler's World, TA is Tatooine Sojourn and SR is the newly launched The Serpent Masters.

What's making me jumpy is that GM ends on May 25th. And TA ends the 26th.

While we have another classic Manning strip waiting in the wings (and it may not be the one that sequentially follows... more on that later), it's time to commit to another original webstrip.

Greedo's Tale was fun, but exhausting, and I learned a lot of things from it and appreciate the positive feedback I got from the rookie endeavor. I want to take those lessons and apply them to a new one, but what's scary is just the sheer amount of work that it takes, and just how undecided I am on what the next strip should be.

That's why, I'm leaning more and more towards doing another short story adaptation. Oh, I've looked at novels. Some really big novels to, but the problem is this: the Greedo short story lasted over 20 weeks. To do a 300-page novel justice could quite imaginably take over two years! Call me commitment-phobic (you wouldn't be the only one), but that's just too big a number.

Sue Rostoni has told me that she'd be fine with me pitching an original story, and I would like to do that ... but right now, I don't have the time or the brainspace to develop that.


ph