Our Kickstarter closed at $4,000+ past the final stretch goal, which means not only are backers getting four books, they’re making me write a fifth one.
Which means it’s time for me to get back to work. Maybe at some point in the next two weeks I’ll have time to go to the movies again.
The Schlock Mercenary Kickstarter for books 14 and 15 has cleared another stretch goal, and backers who get those two books now get electronic versions of The Howard Tayler Retrospective Sketchbook and An Honest Death And Other Stories at no additional charge.
We only have three covers pictured because we’re a little surprised to have gotten this far.
The project also unlocked add-ons for five new Schlock Mercenary universe challenge coins, and a sixth coin which is a key fob version of the Maxim 70 coin.
The final stretch goal is out there a bit. It’s an R&D goal, and it’s about $13,000 away. If we reach it, I’ll write a novel in the Schlock Mercenary universe.
I’m probably going to write it anyway, but with a proper budget I’ll also edit it, polish it up, and Sandra and I will explore ways to publish it. Perhaps it will get its own Kickstarter. Maybe we’ll shop it around with editors (or get an agent and have them do that) so that people with an existing infrastructure for prose can handle the heavy lifting.
The novel will definitely happen if we reach $125k. But if, between now and 6pm Eastern Time on Friday we reach $115k, I’ll make the first chapter available to backers at no charge.
And because were within just $3,000 of that goal already, I’m making the prologue available to everybody right now.
“Name?”
“Lu”
“Occupation?”
“Detective.”
“Planet, station, or vessel of first residence?”
“Luna.”
“You’re ‘Lu from Luna?’”
“It’s what happens when you’re allowed to choose your own name within moments of arriving at full sapience.”
“Moving on… where did you find the body?”
“Officer, that’s a leading question.”
“It’s just a question, Lu.”
“It presupposes an unsupported theory regarding the provenance of the body in question, which could have come into our possession in any number of ways less ostensibly damning than ‘we found it.’”
“But you DID find it.”
“You have the testimony of two witnesses whose stories contradict each other on every salient point except one, which is that they both happened to use the word ‘found’.”
“You know what? Forget the body for a moment.”
“Hard to do given its proximity, but this deposition is your circus.”
“I said forget the body. I have new concerns, starting with how you know whose testimony we do and do not have?”
“THAT, officer, is an excellent and fair question, and it is the first of such questions whose answer I will, for now, simplify to ‘I am a detective.’”
SHAFTERS SHIFTERS AND THE DRAGONS OF DAMAXURI is a work in progress by Howard Tayler
The Schlock Mercenary Kickstarter for volumes 14 and 15 of the long-running comic space opera has funded to a level where it will include a short fiction collection of non-Schlock Mercenary stuff.
I said that last week.
Last night it funded to the point that we can design and print some new challenge coins, and that particular stretch goal is just $5k short of the one which follows, the Howard Tayler Retrospective Sketchbook. We’ll put that together (PDF only, at least for now) if we hit the $110k mark, but we need to reach that goal by 6pm Eastern Time on Friday.
As of this writing we’re less than $4k away.
The book would include some of the art of which Howard is proudest, the work where he feels he really leveled up, and was on his game. It will also include some of his very worst work, because the point of the book is to show eighteen years of progress¹. And obviously we’ll be including lots of insightful, amusing, and self-deprecatory commentary².
You have two days to get in on this project, and it won’t take very many of you getting in on it to ensure that you’re all getting four books instead of just the original two.
¹ As I’ve said before, my progress over eighteen years isn’t that amazing. In eighteen years you could make a new human from scratch and then teach them to draw better than me.
² You want self-deprecatory? Here goes: The best reason to NOT back the project right now is to ensure that a generation of artists doesn’t get this PDF and learn to draw like Howard does, a catastrophe which would set the entire art form back about two hundred years.