I’m Howard. Like most people, I do a lot of different things. I do some of them for money. This site is where you’ll be able to find all of them, and it’s the only home for some of them.
I’m probably best known for Schlock Mercenary, the online comic space opera that I created back in 2000, and which updated every day from June 2000 to July 2020 at schlockmercenary.com. The comic strip is still what currently feeds our family, and that’s awesome.
Related to that, back in 2015 I joined forces with Alan Bahr, and with Sandra Tayler’s expert help we launched a Kickstarter for the Planet Mercenary Role Playing Game. The project was very involved, involving several artists, three editors, and numerous play-testers, and it took just over two years to complete. I didn’t do any of the illustration, but I wrote a couple hundred thousand words. It shipped during the summer of 2017.
You might have heard my voice on Writing Excuses, the weekly podcast for genre fiction writers that I co-founded with Brandon Sanderson, and Dan Wells. We launched that back in 2008, and it updates weekly at writingexcuses.com. We’re in our 20th season now, and the current hosts are Mary Robinette Kowal, Erin Roberts, Dong Won Song, and me.
In 2020 I contracted COVID-19, and ended up with Long COVID, which manifests as chronic fatigue. As a relatively new member of the “walks with a stick” club I’m a passionate advocate for disability awareness and accessibility initiatives. I currently work from a zero-gravity recliner using a Surface Pro with a big TV as my 2nd monitor. The tablet (and many, MANY other tools) is mounted on a boom, so my workstation looks kind of sci-fi-ish. Also, I taught my stick how to carry my phone, so my phone could teach me not to leave home without my stick.
From time to time I review movies and TV, and I’m horribly biased. If you want to know whether I had fun at the cinema, you can follow my reviews at this site clicking on the “Movie Review” tag. Or that link.
Looking for my prose? My Bibliography has the full list, or at least it will eventually. Most recently, my short story “An Honest Death” appears in SHADOWS BENEATH: The Writing Excuses Anthology. I’ve also done novelettes, novellas, shorts, and even flash pieces for Skull Island Expeditions (a Privateer Press imprint). If you like Lovecraftian horror, my work has also appeared in Space Eldritch, and Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars.
On the side, for no pay whatsoever, I paint 28mm miniatures, experiment with food, and crash in front of the occasional video game. Over the years my list of favorites has grown to include Skyrim, ESO, XCom, Fallout 4, Ark: Survival Evolved, Valheim, Outer Worlds, and Pokémon GO.
I also write a lot. Usually it’s skeets (@howardtayler.bsky.social) or community posts on Discord (Hypernode Connect Discord server) but sometimes I blog about stuff, old-school (I remember when blogging was the new thing, yes.) This site is the best place to start for finding that stuff, or links to that stuff. Some of it will probably embarrass me. My opinions and my politics have changed significantly in the last 25 years, but there’s no point in trying to hide who I was. You can see my clumsy efforts at cartooning in the early archives of Schlock Mercenary, and some pretty wrong-headed stances in the archived blog posts here.
On the completely non-embarrassing front, I’m the very happy husband to Sandra Tayler, and we’re the parents of four. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I’m also cat-owner, and a home-owner (though it can be argued that the cats own the house, paperwork notwithstanding.)
But who am I really? Beyond the things I make, and the people I love (and the cats who demand my fealty), beyond the physical features and the conglomeration of organic molecules I’ve bound up in my almost-sixty-year quest to forestall entropy, who am I?
Seriously? How can I answer that? Look, the best I can do is say that I have been all of the Howards who wrote these journal entries, and each of them was a stage along the long, transformative path to the me of the now. And I’m just the latest stage. If you want to read the blog and meet all those other guys, be my guest.
Be warned, though: they’re not me. And neither is the guy who wrote this…