When I heard that Privateer Press was putting out a wet palette for figpainting I did some research, and learned how to make my own. Ironically, I ended up using a Privateer Press blister box, a sponge, and some wax paper. Total price tag – FREE (I had all the materials on hand.)

It worked great. Wet palette painting has added a huge new dimension to my work, and I demonstrate it all the time at the Friendly Local Games Store.

Friday I picked up the P3 Wet Palette, figuring that it would be better than what I’d put together. Boy was I wrong.

The P3 system is designed to wick water slowly (the “sponge” is a sheet of blister foam. Not absorbant at all, though it LOOKs like a sponge) up to parchment paper that is designed to wick water quickly. The box is not air-tight, and has a lot of air in it thanks to the high lid. The result? Paint dries out in a day at the most. Other flaws — after a day or two the paper has a tendancy to curl right up under your paints, quickly drying your blends. The pad of 20 sheets, therefore is good for a minimum of 20 painting sessions and a maximum of 40 (assuming your sessions are paired back-to-back.)

My system (kitchen sponge, wax paper, Privateer Press blister box) wicks water quickly to the paper, which wicks water quite slowly. I’ve had paints stay good in there for WEEKS, and have painted with the same little puddles for several sessions in a row.

I’ve been experimenting with the P3 palette for two days now, trying to see if I can get it to do what I need it to. It has failed for me repeatedly. It’s better than NOT painting with a wet palette, but it’s far too expensive ($20) for a plastic box, a sheet of cheap foam padding, and a pad of parchment paper that conspire to not work together as well as something you can build for free.

I love the P3 paints, and adore their miniatures. It’s a shame this product is such dross.

Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars is now available for pre-order. This book fits between The Tub of Happiness and Under New Management, and with it you can now own the first 1000 strips in a complete print collection.

The book is $25.00, plus shipping and handling. If you want a numbered, customer-choice sketch edition it’s $35.00+s&h, but those are only available until 8:00am on Friday (GMT-7).

This 228-page volume is in full color on glossy paper, and contains all the strips and footnotes from November 12th of 2001 through March 8th of 2003. It also features some new footnotes, commentary, guest art, eleven pages of all-new bonus story, and an introduction by Brandon Sanderson.

Customers pre-ordering the book will be treated to a page full of desktop wallpapers featuring the full, wrap-around cover art at multiple resolutions and aspect ratios.

Sketch editions will only be available through Friday morning at 8:00am Mountain time, or until we’ve sold 1,000 of them… whichever comes SECOND. Over 150 have already been spoken for by Comic-Con and WorldCon attendees, so don’t delay! If past experience is any indicator, we’ll probably end up selling around 1100 of these by Friday morning, and then they’re gone. (In the unlikely event that we don’t hit 1,000 by Friday, we’ll keep the item available until we do.)

We expect to take delivery of 5,000 books around September 25th, at which point I’ll start signing and sketching. We plan to start shipping books out on October 9th, which gives me two full weeks to finish up those sketches (resting my hand a bit more than I have in the past.)

In the exceedingly unlikely event that you folks buy more than 5,000 books during the pre-order period, there will be a slight shipping delay as we throw more money at our printer and demand a second run. Know, however, that this is just the sort of problem I’d love to have.

And now, the FAQ:

Q: Can I buy other stuff from the store, and have you ship it all at once?

A: Absolutely. We have the popular warning-sign magnets back in stock, as well as mousemats, Tagon logo pins, Rule 37 shirts, Rule 1 shirts, and if there are impressionable children in your life, grab a copy of Hold On To Your Horses, the children’s book by Sandra Tayler and illustrated by Angela Call.

Q: Where do you ship?

A: Everywhere.

Q: What does the desktop background look like?

A: This.

Q: What if my order gets damaged, or I’m just not happy with it?

A: We’ll make it right at no additional expense to you. Ask anybody who has shopped with us before — if your book is damaged, or you’re otherwise displeased with your purchase, we’ll fix it. Usually it means sending out a replacement. We’ve upgraded our shipping materials so that there are fewer damaged packages, but it still happens.

Q: I don’t like credit cards or Paypal. Can I pay with a cheque?
A: It’s slower, but yes. The instructions for that are on the store.

Q: I’ve got a question that is not on this list. Why can’t you read my mind?

A: I actually can read your mind. I ran out of steam typing the list in. Email schlockmercenary@gmail.com with your question and we’ll answer it for you.

We will open worldwide pre-orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars on Tuesday, September 2nd at 8:00am Mountain Time.

The book is $25.00, plus shipping and handling. If you want a numbered, customer-choice sketch edition, it’s $35.00+s&h.

Sketch editions will be available until at least Friday morning at 8:00am, so you have three full days to order one of those. If we haven’t hit 1,000 by then, we’ll keep sketch editions available until we do.

If you crazy people order more than 1,000 between Tuesday morning and Friday morning, well… Sandra will have to let me draw in all of them because that is much less complicated than refunding money would be. Let’s show her who’s boss.

We ship just about anywhere in the world, including APO addresses. We’ve shipped product to all seven continents and to at least 40 countries. It should go without saying that we’ve shipped to all 50 United States, but I just counted to make sure. Yup. We’ve only shipped to eight out of ten Canadian provinces, though, so those of you hailing from Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland & Labrador need to get with the program. I’m not sure how the system tracks U.S. or Canadian Territories, but I suspect those of you in the Mariana Islands and Nunavut also remain unrepresented.

We plan to ship these books in six weeks, beginning on October 9th.

If you pre-ordered your book at Comic-Con, and I told you that you had an “advance copy,” your book will go into the mail on Saturday. I’m sorry it’s not in the mail yet! I still need to create the uber-cool Customer Choice Sketch Edition stamp, and until I know the exact number of books I’ll be sketching, I can’t. But I’ll have a number come Friday.

Just last week I was scripting and I used the phrase “revoke metaphor privileges.” It made me giggle, but it sounded familiar. I worried that maybe I was stealing from somebody.

Turns out I’m stealing from me. I decided to run the line anyway. In the linked instance above it’s the punchline. In the upcoming script (three or four weeks out, I forget) it’s the setup for a different punchline.

And the point, long since lost by now, is that I’ve now posted 3,000 installments of Schlock Mercenary to the web in 3,000 days. No, I’ve never missed a day. There have been no guest weeks, no two-for-Tuesdays to cover a missed-it-Monday, and no stretches where I hurriedly threw together a week of Ennesby and Schlock doing plot exposition because I knew I could get seven days of that penciled, inked and colored inside of four hours.

Okay, maybe that last one has happened. At least twice. Still, nobody called me on it.

We’ve all changed a lot in the last 3,000 days. Politics, global economics, and science have all done interesting, disappointing, wonderful, and terrible things in turn. But more importantly most of us have gotten 3,000 days older, and at least 250 days wiser. Some of you have told me that you have practically grown up reading this comic strip of mine.

Three thousand days is longer than any American President has sat in office since 1944. It’s long enough for a bull market to become a bear market, and then back again three or four times. It’s long enough to turn a 9th-grader into a college graduate, or a college graduate into a surgeon.

It’s long enough for Sandra to create two beautiful children from scratch and send them off to school. It’s long enough for me to start a marketing career, excel in it, and then abandon it.

It’s long enough for me to start getting a handle on the basics of writing and illustrating a comic strip. It’s also long enough for me to have figured out how to pay the bills with a comic strip I’m still just exploring basic principles with.

3,000 days is a long time, but it’s not long enough.

I want 10,000 days. That’s 28 years, give or take. I’m not setting that as a maximum, mind you. I’m just holding out for permanence in this particular career. I want us to be able to look back on these times and remember the best of them fondly, while forgetting the worst of them in favor of remembering our favorite punchlines.

Which I will almost certainly re-use.