Ah, the end of the month and a last desperate attempt to get in a blog entry for April.

It’s not that I don’t have stuff to update you about. I do. But I’ve been terribly busy of late, and not with all those personal writing projects I’d been pondering about as of my last blog. You see, I’ve taken on a full-time job.

No, I haven’t given up my career. Rest assured, all those concerned friends and fans who got in touch with me after my last melancholy musings, I didn’t freak out and join the rat race. It’s just that there’s been a death in the family. Yes, another one. Big family, finally starting to run low on members of what was once a particularly vast generation.

The difference is, this time I’ve sort of had the estate dumped in my lap. With just about everyone else dead and buried, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel as to who gets to play executor. As a result, I’ve had to step up to the plate as the one best qualified to do the paperwork and legwork. “Best qualified” basically means not disinterested or deranged. All the writing I’m doing these days involves letters to lawyers, bankers and investment brokers, trying to sort out a ten-way inheritance split between two generations of Simmonses. It feels so much like a real job, I’ve been reminded why I dropped out of that whole scene a good fifteen years back in favour of the leisurely life of a scribe. I expect to be over the hump in this settling of affairs by the end of May, but until then most of my time is spoken for.

As far as updates about my real job go, I just wanted to mention that the second season of Pucca began airing earlier this month. That’s seven more of my cartoons that should be showing up on all your favourite pirate sites in dribs and drabs before too long. If you never caught the first season, half of it has now been released on DVD in two volumes of random episodes. Each disc features only one of my toons in the mix. The other five will doubtless appear on the next release. Still, it’s a little bit exciting since this marks the first official release of any of my material on DVD. My episodes of Sci-Squad were released on video as part of a teachers-aid educational series, but video hardly counts for shit these days.

It would be more of a cause for celebration if I actually received any royalties for this, but sadly I won’t be seeing one red cent in residuals. So when I direct you to where you can buy these DVDs online, be confident that I only do this as a well-intentioned service, and not as a shameless cash-grab attempt to boost sales.