Category Archives: Journal

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.

Announcements, Crossposted, Journal

We’re Having a Wedding This Week

Our oldest daughter, Keliana, is getting married on Wednesday. This has been playing merry Hell with my schedule, but it’s the very epitome of “merry Hell,” because we’re all quite happy.

Tyler and Keliana are very good for each other, and to each other, and the old saw about not losing a daughter but gaining a son seems to apply pretty well here. I mean, except for the part where they’re not living with us because they’re off to have their own adventures.

(If it’s not obvious, the illustrations in this post are Keliana’s work.)

Announcements, Crossposted, Journal

2020: There Will Be An Ending

The Schlock Mercenary mega-arc will draw to a close this year.

The arc began when Schlock enlisted with Tagon’s Toughs in the strip dated June 12, 2000. That means it’s basically everything that has appeared on this site so far. It will end with closure, resolution, satisfaction, and a big, all-caps “THE END.”

I’ve been saying this for a while now, and every time I say it somebody pops up and says “wait, what?” So I’m saying it again, but this time around there’s an air of urgency.

You probably have questions. I shall attempt to FAQ you some answers.

Q: When will it end exactly?
A: I’m not telling. Before October, though.

Q: Will all the books be put into print?
A: Absolutely! That’s pretty much our highest priority.

Q: Why are you doing this?
A: Because everybody—the characters, the readers, and okay mostly me—deserves the opportunity to close the book and have a nice rest.

Q: What are you going to do next?
A: My current plans are to explore the true meaning of the word “sabbatical.” Those plans depend on how the finances shake out.

Q: Will there be more stories in the Schlock Mercenary Universe?
A: Yes. Lots of them. We can talk about what kinds of stories they’ll be when I start telling them.

Q: Will there still be daily comics at schlockmercenary.com?
A: That kind of depends on how I arrange things for the sabbatical. I’m sorry if that sounds ominous.

Schlock Mercenary is one of the longest-running things I’ve done with my life. I’ve been a husband and a father for longer, but my career at Novell only ran for 11 years. Taken in its legally-defined entirety, my whole childhood only ran for 18 years, and I can’t remember the first four of those, so it’s more like 14.

I am forced to concede the point that it’s unlikely I’ll launch anything that runs longer than Schlock Mercenary’s 20 years. There are too many different things I want to do, and in twenty years I’ll be 71 (or dead, because there’s a happy thought.)

So here we are, at the start of a shiny new year, and I’m talking about endings. There will be plenty of beginnings for me this year, and you can rest assured I’ll talk about them when the time comes.

Crossposted, Journal

Big Dumb Objects: Pre-Orders Begin Next Week!

Big Dumb Objects, Schlock Mercenary Book 16, is almost ready for the printer!

This coming Tuesday we’ll begin the pre-order process using Kickstarter¹. The project will run for about a month, ending shortly before Thanksgiving, and will include some fun and fancy stretch goals like Planet Mercenary content, challenge coins, and stuff so cool (but so not-yet-approved) that we don’t even dare hint at it.

The project will definitely include a slipcase fitted for books 12 through 16.

We’ll also do some videos for this one. The cover art isn’t done yet, so we’ll take this opportunity to stream its creation over at twitch.tv/howardtayler, starting with pencils, and moving all the way into final inks. (The coloring won’t be streamed. Travis colors these things off-camera.)

We hope you’ll join us next Tuesday (or maybe Wednesday?) and help us fund the creation of a book so big we promised ourselves we weren’t going to do a book this big².

¹ We’re aware of Kickstarter’s position with regard to unionization. We support the unionizers at Kickstarter United, and agree with them: boycotting Kickstarter will hurt all the wrong people. (Yes, including us.)
² At 256 pages Big Dumb Objects is the same size as Massively Parallel — the book which convinced us to stop doing books this big. Maybe putting words for “large” in the title is the problem here.

Art, Crossposted, Events, Journal

FanX Typecast RPG Report: SO MUCH FUN

I don’t know if video exists¹ beyond this short clip from Brian McClellan’s phone, but for four hours on Thursday I role-played as a bard, while loosely interpreting the game on an overhead projector.

It was a blast. Odrak The Bard fails successive survival and constitution checks on his trip through the swamp. The berries were not supposed to go in his mouth, but they did.

It was also terrifying.

No preliminary sketches, no templates, no “undo” function—I drew on paper, with markers, and we put all the art up for quick sale, proceeds going to the UCASA charity. For just $2.00 audience members could grab one of my sketches AND drop a suggestion in the jar, assigning an action to an NPC named Gallant.

Gallant was a dog. I decided it would be fun if Gallant was that rare, hardy breed commonly known as a were-poodle. It was a risky decision, and during the course of the evening Gallant looked more and more like a demonic sheep².

None of the pictures of Gallant stayed on the table long enough for me to capture them with my phone. One particularly memorable sketch featured Gallant, airborne, urinating on the paladin’s sword. Per the audience’s suggestion, of course. That’s not a thing I’d just DRAW³.

The Typecast RPG Newsletter has lots of pictures in it, and will have many, many more as the game continues. Subscribe here!

¹ If you were there, and have video, send it to @TypecastRPG on Twitter or Instagram so we can share with the world.
² In the future I’ll be grabbing reference art for poodles AND sheep before starting, to make it easier to (HA!) tell the sheep from the fluffy, fluffy wolves.
³ Then again, I did draw a nude-but-for-boxers tiefling sprawled all come-hithery on a petal-dusted bed, so perhaps my standards for these things are lower than any of us thought.