You may or may not know that in addition to this journal, to I have a LiveJournal account. I don’t do too much posting over there; mainly I was happy to be able to post in LiveJournal world as other than anonymous and take advantage of that lovely Friends List option. And since I have about 15 fairly active LiveJournals I like to follow, it’s been a great time saver.

But I do try to post something every Wednesday when I make note of a Dicebox update. I try not to repeat it here, partly out of principal, partly because most of the people whose Friends List I’m on read this journal as well. But I have once before, and I feel like doing so again, slightly different reasons but both because I wanted to make more public note of something.

So:

So, unlike last week, there is indeed a new page of Dicebox up at Girlamatic. Sorry about missing last week, demands of the day job and being ill overwhelmed me. I hope to make up that page by the end of November.

In the Ironic Department, Kip emailed me a link to this journal entry by Jason Kimble in which he ruminates over the strategy of update schedules. (I winced when I read “If I know Dicebox will be there every Wednesday�”) Basically, should a webcomic try for a weekly update or wait til it has a more complete multi-page story to offer and the pros and cons to each.

Speaking from my own point of view, as a creator, I need to do the weekly update. Given my life and artistic tendencies, if I waited to release a chapter or a scene all at once, I’d actually produce less in a given year. I need the constant little deadlines to keep me on track and to force myself to come to a stopping point with a page instead of working it over to death.

I do agree that by and large Dicebox works best read in large chunks, and I definitely have readers that do just that. But I also have those who write and tell me that they check in every week. And though my updates are definitely “whatever page is next,” my pages, by my natural inclination, a discrete unit of story, which I think helps with the weekly updates.

And, actually, I have had a few people write to tell me that they subscribed to Girlamatic simply because they missed a couple weeks of Dicebox and needed to catch-up.

And I actually figure by and large people do both, that is, read the pages weekly and go back and read larger chunks. But I believe comics naturally get re-read many times, more so than most types of storytelling. And I am hopefully creating a comic that can bear up under repeated scrutiny and still be entertaining.