A package arrived today, wrapped in brown cardboard and a thick mixture of anticipation and foreboding.

I knew it to contain the advance copies of Schlock Mercenary: The Tub Of Happiness, but I did not yet know with perfect certainty that the copies were going to be, in a word, “shiny.”

I said as much to Sandra, but in different words. As she cut into the box I said “this is the moment where we either know it’s all going to work out, or we discover that we are well-and-truly screwed.”

You see, we opened pre-orders without having seen a real press proof of the product. We had plenty of other evidences (blank book, plotter proofs, digital prints, etc), but this was the first time the whole enchilada was going to appear on a plate, smothered in actual cheese sauce. If what showed up was actually corn husks baked in road tar, the Tayler Corporation was going to have to scramble to make good on a few tens of thousands of dollars of customer service.

That just doesn’t bear thinking about. So of course we opened the box before either of us could spin a proper “death of the business” scenario.

Hopefully in forcing you to sit through all this lead-in before I describe the books I have successfully enabled you to share in a measure of my trepidation.

Oh, the suspense.

The books are gorgeous. Everything is going to be okay.

We got five advance copies. One is for us to keep safe and shiny. One goes to Dragons Keep with me as a store copy for people to peruse. One will probably get handed to my kids. That leaves two.

I am going to turn one of those two into sketch edition 0001/1234, and then put it up for auction next week. This is because I am a soulless mercenary with a sadistic streak.

What of the last book? I don’t know… I just don’t know. There are so many worthy causes to which it could be contributed…

–Howard

You’ve heard it before from me and countless others. Just because I’m not writing doesn’t mean there’s nothing to write about.

Thursday I helped one of the Spaceward Games teams repair their propulsion system (I fixed the leaky flow-meters that made up part of the liquid-cooling system for a 10-kilowatt bank of IR lasers).

Friday my youngest brother was in town demonstrating that he is not the boring kind of accountant (he is the kind of accountant whose research other accountants look at and ask “are you sure this is accounting?”)

Saturday I played in the Hordes Stampede tournament at Dragon’s Keep, and took third place (or thereabouts) and the “Beast Hunter” medal. I played with an untuned, untested army list, and played really, really well.

Sunday was church, which, since I’m the financial secretary for the local congregation of Saints, meant that in addition to the usual worship services I got to balance the books. Far be it from me to make fun of accountants — the books balanced, everything is in perfect order, and I took quite a bit of pleasure in that.

Monday… back to work, scripted a great week of comics (is it a spoiler if I say there are hints of a very interesting Tagon back-story?) and stirred the dry, thickening skin under, revealing the quietly simmering mess in a pot of Wikipedia politics (I may blog about that in more detail, if only to make sure somebody keeps stirring.)

Tuesday, banged out that week of comics in pencil and ink, and got to stay up late playing with my 4-year-old (he took a nap, and got to skip everyone else’s bedtime).

Each of these events merits a full-page blog entry of its own, and I kept meaning to write those entries, but when I sat down to write I realized I needed to get up and do whatever was coming next.

My life would seem more interesting to everyone else if I could strike some sort of balance between writing about it and living it, but more and more I’m finding that, when time permits, I prefer to allow my life to seem completely uninteresting to the rest of the world, and absolutely, fascinatingly packed with all the big and little things that make it wonderful for me and a few first-hand observers.

Hello, fair reader.

You probably don’t live in Utah, and you probably don’t use Adobe InDesign.

Probably.

But it’s possible that you do, and it’s possible also that you know somebody who does.

Here’s the deal. Our book layout-guy, Steve Troop, is working on a new, top-secret project, and won’t be able to help us with the next 240-page Schlock book (at least not before mid-2008). This last one just about killed him. So we’ve decided to take it in-house, and since my arms are already full-to-bursting with creating bonus content for said book, we’ve further decided that Sandra will be doing the layout.

She doesn’t know how, and I’m told the learning curve can be quite steep.

Ideally, some kind, local expert would come to our home, break bread with us, and walk Sandra through the basics. We have the bread. We’ll shortly have the templates that point out which basics are germane. We have Adobe InDesign CS2. What we lack is a kind, local expert.

In case you missed the news, Radiohead (one of the biggest bands of the decade) has decided to release their new album in the same way I released the Strohl Munitions Coloring Book: you name your price, and you get the digital goods.

Okay, I’m not claiming to have invented this, nor am I claiming that Radiohead got the idea from me. People have been doing this for years, starting with a couple of shareware developers in 1984 who made millions of dollars at it.

The official Radiohead site is here. The album will be available in ten days, but you can pay now, naming your price. Personally, I would love to see Radiohead make hojillions of dollars at this, permanently validating that which I know to already be valid. Just because a warm fuzzy is redundant doesn’t mean it’s not warm and fuzzy.

In other news, what do you call a legion of the walking dead who are running out of corpses to feed on, and will drop into a ditch sometime in the next twenty years? RIAA.