that don't mind refilling my coffee cup while I sit there scribbling in a sketchbook. If I stay in, I may paint in the morning and write the strips in the afternoon, and other days I reverse that order. If the deadlines are looming too large, the painting takes a back seat.
Writing the strips is a lot about me sitting still in a quiet room. There's no method or secret. I just sit very still until an idea drifts by, and then I jump out and grab it by its little throat and squeeze the humor out of it with my bare hands. This can go on from a couple of hours up to six or seven, depending on how the ideas are running. With Baby Blues, I write a script in a format that Rick and I have developed over the years. In rare cases I'll send a quick sketch along with the script if the idea is too hard to get across in words. I like to send him more than a week's worth of dailies and more than one Sunday at a time, but that doesn't always happen.
With Zits, it's kind of the same process, but I draw a fairly tight version of the strips in pencil and e-mail those to Jim.
I quit working at 5 p.m., have dinner with the family, and often paint in the evenings when it's not my turn to put the little one to bed. I usually don't work on the strips on weekends.
That's it. Not a bad life at all. I like my jobs.
