Whatever stomach-bug Sandra had yesterday is mine today. It’s hard to get anything done when the small gods of Gastro and Enteritis make war with one another, hurling their spears in the battleground of my belly. Their minions die by the thousands… it makes me sick to my stomach.

The gastro-enteritis war is depleting resources from other bodily nations, so I’m sending for aid packages all the way around. I see help on the horizon — troop and supply trains from Hotbath and Longnap.

Sketch editions… I think we’ve got 753 confirmed orders, and another 100 or so in limbo. We’ll get it all squared away before we set the number on the rubber-stamp.

A refreshing 10mph wind might be described as “brisk.”

610 orders in 14 hours is a rather faster wind than that. At the risk of stretching the metaphor just a bit, you guys have blown me away.

The print run is paid for. After paying for postage and design royalties (Steve Troop gets a cut from each book) we will have enough left over to cover the new HP printer, some Christmas shopping, and a full month of my salary. And that’s just based on the orders that have come in during the last 14 hours.

Yeah. Blown away. Thank you.

Several thoughts are competing right now for “first in the day’s Journaling.” I’m going to lead with the one that I think deserves to be first:

1) My readers are wonderful. They’re the best comic readers in the WHOLE WORLD. If it wasn’t for them being willing to buy stuff, I wouldn’t be able to do this full-time, and if the first hour of pre-orders are any indication, they’re willing to buy stuff.

2) Pre-orders are open, and you can get a sketch edition for the next 22.75 hours. Head over to store.schlockmercenary.com before it’s too late.( Yeah, you probably already knew this, but this thought was clamoring loudly to be #1, and I had to really WORK to push it to #2)

3) If you want to play “how many books has Howard sold,” the first order number of the day was #1203. Feel free to report your order number here, and marvel over the enthusiasm and good will of Schlock readers (see #1 above).

4) I need to do something today besides clicking “refresh” on the store’s administration page. I’m really anxious to hit the break-even point. It may look like I’m rolling in dough, but until I’ve sold oh, about 571 books the print run won’t have paid for itself. Only then will I relax, knowing that the next few months’ of cartoonist salary are being socked away. (If your order number is 1774, your order and every one thereafter is in the “paying the salary” category.)

It rained today. I got wet.

Oh, and we discovered that my HP LaserJet 4m printer, age 13 & 1/2 years, will not power up anymore. I think the brownout we had killed it dead, which is odd, because it’s on a surge-protected line. I guess the printer had it coming.

Every Schlock Mercenary strip you’ve ever read — EVERY LAST ONE — began life as a script that was printed with that printer. It’s the end of an era, I tell you. (Maybe I can sign the printer in sharpie and sell it to a museum…)

It’s also just a little bit inconvenient. I’ve only got four scripts left to pencil before I have to print more, and I’ve nothing to print them with. So… I’m buying a new printer, and paying for 2-day shipping. There goes the first $500 of pre-order revenue, right there. I’m buying a Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 2605DN. 12pp per minute, and supposedly good for 2500 b/w pages on the black cartridge. The color cartridges are less likely to last as long, as they’re only rated for 2000 pages — at 5% coverage, saith the fine print. I think that means I can print exactly 20 pages each of full-fill cyan, magenta, and yellow. After that I get to spend $240 on refills. But who knows? Maybe I can sell a few “Limited Edition Prints” and keep myself in toner indefinitely.

Hope springs eternal. Which is nice, because when it rains, I get wet.