I don’t say enough about how wonderful Sandra is. It’s not just that she’s smart, funny, beautiful, and the mother of my children… she’s also the best mother I have ever met — better than her own, and way better than mine.

Recently she’s been posting about kid-management stuff (sandratayler), and I have been brought again to realize that she is brilliantly adept when it comes to discerning what our children need, what they mean when they talk/sulk/scream/mumble, and how to balance their needs against her own.

I love you, Sandra. And hey, look! It’s not even our anniversary, or your birthday, or Mothers’ day, or anything like that. It’s just today, one more day in a happy chain of thousands. Thank you for all of them.

–Howard

I just took three naps. I announced my intention to lie down at around 9:55 this morning. At about 11:15 I was awake again, but still exhausted and feeling sick. So I took a quick shower (I shouldn’t have put that off this morning) and then took a second nap. At 12:25 I got up, wandered around in circles for a bit, took some vitamin C, and went back to bed. I woke up again at around 2:00pm, and decided to make lunch.

I’m feeling a lot better now, except for the part where most of the day is already gone and all I got done was some coloring between 8:25am and 8:45am. Sandra says I should put “convention recuperation” on my list of things to do. I may list each nap individually, just so I can check them off.

–Howard

I cranked out about 800 signatures in around three hours today, walked to 7-11 for a Slurpee, and then sat down and cranked out 100 sketch-edition pictures between the hours of 3:00pm and 11:00pm. I took a couple of good-sized breaks in there. Lorna, who joins us for GURPS on Fridays, is a licensed Massage Therapist. She rescued my hand after #80, and kneaded my shoulder and arm back into decent shape after #100.

In one hour I whipped out 20 sketch editions. That’s one every three minutes, INCLUDING the time it takes to switch books, number the sketch (e.g. “65/300”), and sign the front. Interestingly, some of my very favorites were the ones that only took 90 seconds to draw.

Maybe next time I’ll get ambitious and let you pick which character you want in your book. This time around it’s my choice. There’s been a lot of Schlock, Tagon, and Ennesby, several Legs, several Nick (including one for a Schlocker named Nick — I swear, that was an accident), a couple of Elf, two Xinchubs and exactly one Jevee Ceeta. There were a few “special” ones in there as well, where I recognized the name on the envelope, and drew something appropriate. I had to be careful, though, because as the night wore on (and on, and on, and on) my definition of “appropriate” slid a bit. I knew I’d crossed a line somewhere when the book for Paul Southworth almost ended up with a Schlock Mercenary/Ugly Hill crossover tentacle… um… scene. I kept giggling to myself and not touching the pen to the paper.

I’ll save Paul’s for tomorrow, when I’m awake, alert, and fresh. Or not-so-fresh. Whatever.

I wish I knew all of you better. I wish I could be sketching your books in person, with you standing there in front of me saying stuff to set me off. Cartooning is the best job in the world, and it’s even more fun with a live audience.

Anyway, 1/3 of the sketch editions are done, and we only have about 165 mailers left to go out (a bunch of the sketch editions are for pre-orders taken at the Keep). We have exactly 1600 packages to put in the mail, and over 1300 of them have been taken to the post office and shipped. Another 150 or so got filled up after the last postal pickup, and will go out first thing in the morning.

Considering that I’ve only had the books in my possession for 30 hours, I’m pretty pleased. My hand hurts and I’m exhausted, but I’m happy.

–Howard

Yesterday afternoon, around 4:00pm, I gave the very first Schlock book away to a forklift operator named Jack.

Jack and I were having trouble getting the (insert epithet here) defective pallets to stay under their loads, and we realized that we were going to have to break them down. So I cut into the wrap, and the two of us re-stacked 3750 pounds of boxes into a double layer in the back of the 14″ U-Haul I’d rented. Since I wasn’t yet sure these really were MY books, I cut open one of the boxes and checked.

There should have been “level completed” them music when I opened that box. It was a powerful moment for me.

Anyway, Jack and I had been talking, and I explained to him that sure, I could have saved a few bucks having them deliver the books, but I had customers waiting, and I needed to sign them all, and oh, yeah, I’m the guy who wrote these. I handed him a book, and he checked the inside back cover. “Hey, there you are!” he said.

There I am indeed.

(Now that I’ve been into some of the boxes, I’d like to be able to give Jack the book he “nudged” with the forklift blade. It has a very, very subtle crimp in the cover — he had a gentle touch with that forklift, even with a ton of books in his prosthetic, metal arms.)

He cautioned me about the truck, saying “you’ll definitely feel it” in reference to hauling nearly two tons of printed matter over the Point of the Mountain. And as I drove off, I pondered. I ruminated. And I turned up the A/C, because I was a sweaty mess, and it was 95 degrees (35 C) outside.

It occurred to me that this very literal “sweat equity” is something I wouldn’t have gotten from this project had I not self-published. There is something noble, honest, and perhaps even sacred about manual labor like this. Sure, it’s not something I want to have to do every day in order to put bread on the table, but you have to be willing to do it. And as a result, the last 55 miles those books travelled before being handed off to the Post Office, they travelled alone with me in a rented truck. I’d like to think we bonded a little bit.

I also worried, especially when the tractor trailer full of I-beams was on my left, and the double-long tank-trailer full of gasoline was merging in on my right. The irony inherent in dying in a twisted fireball along with all 5000 copies of my first book would have been powerful stuff. I’m glad the Universal Agent In Charge Of Ironic Death (feel free to replace that string with $DEITY, $KARMA, or $MURPHY) saw fit to stay its hand. If I’m going to die ironically, I want it to be humorous irony on or around my 29th official birthday.