Note: In case you missed it – This Is Me updated last Saturday, off-schedule. It was to be Friday's strip, but I got sidetracked by work.
News: I just finished house-cleaning This Is Me. Since all the ideas for future strips are littered throughout a growing number of sketchbooks, I keep track of my strip ideas using a big spreadsheet. The main idea was to avoid duplicates as well as finding related strips to group into clusters. This approach may seem prosaic, but it's proved rather useful.
When I started doing this a year ago, cataloguing the unused ideas took me a week. For every strip, I list relevant keywords, a possible title, the date of inception, the name of the sketchbook and a brief one-line summary (often the punch line). The spreadsheet currently holds about a hundred and fifty unused strip ideas.
Last fall, the whole cataloguing idea became burdensome and I promptly stopped filing more recent ideas. Two weeks ago, I sat down and spent two days catching up. Then I began to schedule the strips leading up to number 250 (we're at #222 now). It's an odd feeling to see the turns the road is going to take in the upcoming weeks.