Last month, for the first time since I began doing a monthly news update in March 1996, I skipped a month.
This was an educational experience: I learned that there are a lot of people out there who visit the site every month.
I also learned that a lot of them don't come through the front door of this site, where I usually put the month's best new cartoon. They bookmark this page. Since this page hadn't changed, they assumed there was nothing new on the site in January.
Actually, there was: a new cartoon for Matchmaking Creeps, as well as a fifth chapter of Five George Washingtons.
So why didn't I update this page?
It's a lame excuse, but I just got overwhelmed. The combined stress of working full time at ABCNEWS.com website - where I wrote catchy little headlines for the front page - of working on the Washingtons, and on that website, of working on my bimonthly New York City history column and on ballet pieces for Citysearch, was just too much.
Anyway, I've taken the first two weeks of February off to get my act together. This should result, I hope, in a new Joel Fauré episode, as well as additional chapters of the Washingtons.
Among the things that are new this month on the site is a new entryway to the Five George Washingtons, similar to the entryway for Glory in the Golden Apple.
This was the fine suggestion of Tom Standage, a London-based writer who was one of the standouts at the May 4 Web Writers in the Flesh reading. Tom said readers probably didn't like being sent to another site just to read a bit of the story.
So, we'll see. The George Washingtons don't seem to have won readers' hearts the way some other stories have. I had to take down or hide some of the interactive gee-gaws, because people were playing with them instead of reading the story.
I think part of the problem is the length of the story, and its format: it's hard to follow as it jumps from character to character. Web writing, I think, has to be short and very direct. It has to grab you enough to compensate for the inherant discomfort of reading onscreen.
In the meantime, I've signed with an agent who will attempt to sell the Washingtons to a print book publisher.
Is this a sellout? I don't think so. There was some talk at one point about a book of the short stories, and I felt the same way then as I do now: the website is the original form of the work, and a print version is a spinoff of that. It doesn't invalidate the website any more than a play or movie version.
But I imagine some people will disagree with me.