I watched the old Grinch cartoon with my kids, and later had one of those oddball thoughts that probably should not be shared, but that I sometimes share anyway.

“Yahoo Doré” is Who-speak for “Where the hell is my stuff?”

Schlock Mercenary: The Tub Of Happiness has crossed the Bounding Main and the Great American Desert, and is due to arrive in My Driveway sometime tomorrow.

Be apprised: the arrival of four-point-six-eight tonnes of printed material in my driveway is not the same thing as “I’m shipping your book now.” Here is the schedule for the next two weeks:

• Tuesday: shift 3000 books to a storage unit. Break 2000 books out of cartons and begin signing.
• Wednesday through Friday: Bang out a half-ton of sketch editions.
• Saturday & Sunday: Ice my hand. Take the weekend off.
• Monday, December 3rd: Pre-orders officially close.
• Monday through Wednesday: Finish sketch editions.
• Thursday and Friday: Sketched and signed books are boxed and mailed all over the world.*
• Saturday: Release Party at Dragons Keep. If you’re picking your book up in person, that’s the place.

So… if you’ve been wondering where your book is, now you know. It should ship out no later than one week from this coming Friday.

If you’ve been holding off on pre-ordering, don’t wait any longer. The $20 price-tag jumps to $25 on Monday morning, December 3rd, and no non-pre-ordered books will ship until December 12th. You can pre-order Schlock Mercenary: The Tub of Happiness right here.

*Note: This is the official call for volunteers for the shipping party. We’re shipping out of Dragons Keep again. Email sandra.tayler@gmail.com for details.

So… it would seem that the folks who write most of our prime-time television programming are on strike, and from the rhetoric being spewed by both camps, this could shape up into a protracted battle.

I don’t watch prime-time programming. It occurs to me that I’m a horrible judge for how “important” this strike really is, because I’m not feeling it at all (other than reading the headlines with wry amusement.)

So… I’ve got to ask:

A package arrived today, wrapped in brown cardboard and a thick mixture of anticipation and foreboding.

I knew it to contain the advance copies of Schlock Mercenary: The Tub Of Happiness, but I did not yet know with perfect certainty that the copies were going to be, in a word, “shiny.”

I said as much to Sandra, but in different words. As she cut into the box I said “this is the moment where we either know it’s all going to work out, or we discover that we are well-and-truly screwed.”

You see, we opened pre-orders without having seen a real press proof of the product. We had plenty of other evidences (blank book, plotter proofs, digital prints, etc), but this was the first time the whole enchilada was going to appear on a plate, smothered in actual cheese sauce. If what showed up was actually corn husks baked in road tar, the Tayler Corporation was going to have to scramble to make good on a few tens of thousands of dollars of customer service.

That just doesn’t bear thinking about. So of course we opened the box before either of us could spin a proper “death of the business” scenario.

Hopefully in forcing you to sit through all this lead-in before I describe the books I have successfully enabled you to share in a measure of my trepidation.

Oh, the suspense.

The books are gorgeous. Everything is going to be okay.

We got five advance copies. One is for us to keep safe and shiny. One goes to Dragons Keep with me as a store copy for people to peruse. One will probably get handed to my kids. That leaves two.

I am going to turn one of those two into sketch edition 0001/1234, and then put it up for auction next week. This is because I am a soulless mercenary with a sadistic streak.

What of the last book? I don’t know… I just don’t know. There are so many worthy causes to which it could be contributed…

–Howard