(Okay, fine, I admit... the strip may not have actually been totally viewable until midnight, which makes it, I suppose, technically the 27th. But you're not going to begrudge me a few seconds, are you? Wait—okay, midnight Pacific Standard Time, but yeah, it was 11 p.m. in Alaska, and 10 p.m. in Hawaii. So... it was still solidly the 26th in some places. Does that count?)

Actually, I was worried the strip wasn't going to get done at all. My Wacom tablet was acting up, or rather not acting at all... when I plugged it into my computer, the blue light didn't come on that indicates its getting power, and, well, it wasn't doing anything. I tried fiddling with the wire to try to get the connection working, and got the light up for a moment or so at a time, but couldn't get it to stay on. I even essayed to open up the tablet to try to see if I could repair it, but it was held together with screws with very shallow slots that no screwdriver I had could find a purchase in. Eventually, however, I did manage somehow to manipulate the wire to the point that the tablet was working, at least for a time... I did have the same problem twice more later in the day, but each time I did get it working again, though not without some apprehension.

And, yeah, anyway, Thanksgiving... not a day that lends itself to getting a lot of time to work on the strip.

But really, of course, I should have gotten this done a lot earlier. There's no excuse for my having waited as long as I did to start on it; I had all week to do it. (Actually, I guess I sort of had eight or nine years to do it, but let's not go there.) But I guess at least it's done now. And that's the last of the strips that were skipped over and filled in later! Hooray! So... after this we're going back to strips drawn eight years ago! Hooray?

Okay, so, yeah, I know eventually I'm going to run out of old strips, so I'm going to have to start drawing new strips regularly. When I relaunched the strip back in August, I basically had a nine-month buffer. Now that's down to six months. Which means, of course, by the time those six months are up, I'll have to have started drawing a new strip a day again. But... well, right now I'm in the middle of a number of projects, and if I get where I want to get, then within six months I'll have a lot more free time than I have now (and buy a new Wacom tablet?), and doing a daily strip shouldn't be a problem. But hey, at least I've got already-finished strips lined up for the next six months. (Though yeah, I still do need to fix the font.)

(I suppose it goes without saying that even though this strip was (mostly) drawn today (or rather, now, yesterday), rather than eight or nine years ago, I'm not happy with the artwork? In particular, note how the champion is much farther forward on Nezhoni in the last row of strips than he is in the first two rows. Yeah. I guess the saddle slipped forward? Also, I didn't realize till too late that there was another strip just three weeks ago where the O in the title was a boiled egg slice. Dagnabbit.)

Anyway, since this strip was up so very, very late, I think I'll wait to put up tomorrow's strip (or, by the time this full "news" post goes up, today's strip) until noon. So... check back then. And sorry for the delay with this one.