This is me rambling about me, mostly. Current stuff: home, family, my head’s on fire… that kind of thing. This also includes everything imported from LiveJournal.
Book 18, Mandatory Failure, has arrived from the printer. I’ve signed about 2500 copies, and we’ve begun queueing those up for sketches.
A few stacks of MANDATORY FAILURE awaiting sketches from Howard
My stamina is not what it used to be. I’m as fast as ever, but I wear out pretty quickly. Slow and steady, then. If you’ve ordered a sketch edition, it’s in one of these boxes stacked against the wall, and it might be waiting there for a while…
Twelve hundred books. It’s a good thing the sub-floor in this room is solid concrete. Books are heavy.
I’m also doing sketch cards for some of you. I’ve finished about 200 of those already, and another 270 remain to be done. Those take longer, but I can work on them from my zero-gravity recliner, which lets me work for much longer stretches.
How long will you be waiting for your sketched book? I do not know! One thing that I learned in 2024 is that I need to recalibrate my estimates. I promise you this, though: I’ll work on these every day, and I’ll pace myself carefully.
Well, the beginning of the answer to that question can be found in the date of this post. We’re two-thirds of the way through January and I’m only now finding the time and energy to write a year-end thingy.
The end of the answer is a bit bleak. In summary, I learned that I’m more disabled than I thought I was. I still make big plans with high hopes, but then I overdo it and end up “soft” crashing for weeks at a time. This has delayed everything, including the release of Book 18, which we originally planned to be shipping six months ago.
The middle of the answer, the meaty part, would be a retrospective itinerary of sorts, and I’m not sure I have the energy for that kind of detail.
The high points: I finished everything that was keeping Book 18 from being sent to the printer, and I started working on the Bonus Story for Book 19. I attended GenCon Indy, WXR 2024: Write on the Navigator, and Dragonsteel Nexus. I learned to prepare a wide variety of 6FED-friendly meals for Sandra, and because necessity is the mother of invention I invented a no-egg mayonnaise.
One thing I’m quite pleased with: I spent very little time adjusting, revising, or re-working my zero-gravity workstation. Similarly, I didn’t need to iterate my Technocane. I probably put 300 hours into those things during 2023, and those hours began paying dividends in 2024. I learned that there is enormous satisfaction to be found in consuming the fruits of a job well done.
I wish I’d done more, though. I planned to do more, but the chronic fatigue aspects of Long Covid are, to me, the plow described by poet Robert Burns when he bemoaned the state of the best laid plans of mice and men. My plans were big, but were mouse-sized compared to the churning, earth-moving disruption of this disability.
Bleak, perhaps, but let me play a hopeful note as we return to the end of the answer: I learned a lot about my new limits during 2024, and I began arriving at strategies to make the most of the narrower space within which I must work. I won’t make any promises for 2025, not yet at least, because one of those strategies is learning to take things day by day.
Today has been productive for me. I haven’t done all of the things, but even at my healthiest I was never able to do all of the things. I can accept that. I have learned to take the win, and then take a break.
Long COVID has made the last couple of months quite difficult for me. I supposed it’s inaccurate to say that slowing down has been hard for me to do, because I haven’t been given a choice in the matter. What’s been difficult is adapting, adjusting, and ultimately accepting the slow-down.
For those just catching up on the old news, I contracted COVID back in “wave zero,” the community-spread wave in late January of 2020 when none of us thought the virus was here yet. I was the father of the bride at a wedding whose guests included a family who had guests in their home who had recently arrived from Wuhan province in China. I got better, but I never got all the way better, and I’ve been dealing with chronic fatigue ever since.
The salient point: I want to do more than I am doing. I mean, sure, I want to do more than I am *able* to do, which is a pretty common desire among humans of all stripes, but especially among those whose abilities have been, for whatever reason, reduced in scope.
So what *am* I doing? Well, today I’m writing this, and then diving back into the marginalia for Book 18, which we can’t send to the printer until it has all its marginalia. A lot of the pieces are things like this one – concept sketches which I’ve revisited digitally and cleaned up so they look nicer.
Concept sketch of Peri Gugro, a Fobott’r female soldier and (eventual) clan mother
The marginalia is a necessity born of the fact that Schlock Mercenary was not originally formatted for print. Comics should be written and illustrated to the page turn, with attention given to the reveal that occurs as the reader turns the page and uncovers the art and dialog of the next spread. I say “should” be because Schlock Mercenary definitely is NOT written that way.
When we put it into print, we can fit four regular-sized strips on a single page of the book. A week of strips has nine of these rectangular collections of panels, because Sundays have three, and those last three strips in the week need to all be on the same page. Since no amount of fudging the math will make 9 cleanly divisible by 4, a week of Schlock Mercenary takes up three pages of book, and those three pages have some white space.
Hence the marginalia. Sometimes a weekday installment is extra large, sometimes there’s a footnote, and sometimes I broke the pattern in other ways, and so sure, sometimes the white space has taken care of itself, but sometimes my layout shenanigans mean an entire half-page of the book needs a new picture.
So that’s what I’m working on. I wish I could do more, or do it faster, and maybe the booster shot I got two days ago will perk me up the way previous booster shots have, but I’m not going to wait for a cure before I get back to work. I’m just going to accept that I have to slow down.
I met Mike Byers in 2009, and I only knew him for about one week each year. He passed away suddenly this weekend, and I wish I had known him better. I wish all of you could have known him better.
Mike was part of a crew that called themselves “The Kokomo Irregulars.” Back in the early aughts his group descended upon GenCon Indy each year to help Tracy Hickman with events like Killer Breakfast and X-Treme Dungeon Mastery panels, and in 2009 Mike was part of the core group of Kokomo Irregulars who put together Tracy’s first-ever actual booth at GenCon.
I got to be there for that. I didn’t know who these volunteers were, but they were getting the job DONE. Well and truly done. Anyway, that was the year I met Mike, and it’s also when my favorite Mike Byers story takes place.
Tracy was headed to a panel, and was schlepping a forty-pound backpack full of books and electronics away from our booth. I tapped Mike on his enormous shoulder and said “Tracy needs help. Carry his backpack for him, would you?”
Mike said “I’ve tried. Tracy won’t let me.”
“Ah. That’s just Tracy being Tracy,” I said. “When he tells you ‘no,’ you stop him and point back at this booth and say ‘Howard told me you have to let me do this.’”
Mike smiled, and hustled after Tracy. They were far enough away that I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I saw Tracy shake his head, and then Mike pointed back at me. When Tracy turned to look my way I scowled at him, pointed at Mike, then put my hands on my hips. Tracy shrugged, resignedly relinquished his burden, and Mike grinned like a happy fool the whole time.
Ninety minutes later Tracy returned to the booth and thanked me. “I had no idea how much I needed that,” he said, and yes, I felt kind of smug, but this isn’t a story about me. It’s a story about Mike, and it’s just the beginning.
See, he became part of our GenCon crew for the next decade, and he was always throwing other people’s burdens on those big shoulders of his. More than once he told me that I needed to learn what Tracy had learned, that I needed to just step aside and let Mike carry it all, carry on, carry over, and care for me. For all of us.
Mike wasn’t paid for this. We covered badges and hotel rooms for our crew, but Mike and the others insisted that they were volunteers, and were helping out because they liked helping. And they liked us.
This isn’t the behavior of someone who likes you. This is love.
I only knew Mike for one week a year, and only for about ten of those years. I am poorer for not having spent more time with him, and I’m sorry to say that you’re all poorer for not having met him. Or maybe you did get to meet him at GenCon Indy, sometime between 2009 and 2019, when he was part of my favorite found family ever, my GenCon family.
L-to-R: Mike Byers, Jim Zub, Sandra Tayler, Howard Tayler, and Robin Byers
We’ll miss you Mike. If Heaven is a place where there are no more burdens to be borne, well… maybe God will let you run day-trips to Hell, because I can’t imagine you being truly happy without having someone else to help.
