A little back-story… I never really wanted to put the first 3 years of Schlock into print, but I’m going ahead and doing it. You folks demanded it, so here it comes.

But back when I first started prepping for books, I figured I’d provide a starting point for the printed matter that had decent artwork, and that introduced characters effectively. Thus it was that in the archives “Book I” was Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management.

Well, that’s changing, and I’ve updated the archives to reflect this. Under New Management is Book 3. When Schlock Mercenary: The Tub Of Happiness hits the streets, you’ll see a numeral “1” on the spine. When The Teraport Wars comes out next year (hopefully pretty quickly — we’re not going to waste any time on this next one) it will have a nice numeral “2.” And when Under New Management and The Blackness Between are reprinted, the 2nd editions will have (along with the various typo fixes) the numerals “3” and “4” on the spine.

I have to confess, at first this was confusing for me. Then I realized that the confusion was a result of having memorized the book numbers in Roman Numeral form, enumerated sequentially from what was the third volume in a chronology, and then being asked to change. But when I went into the archives and made all the changes it got much, much easier on my poor brain.

If you check out the Schlock Mercenary Archive Synopsizer you’ll see that right now we’re in the midst of Part II of Book 9: Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic. See how easy that was? Easy-Peasy!

I’ll still tell people that Book 3, Under New Management is a good place to start. I’ll probably still kick off storylines with just a little bit of back-and-fill, re-introducing characters. But now your bookshelves (and my archives) can be properly sequential. Oh, and those first editions of UNM and TBB are clearly going to be collectors items, what with the absence of a number on the spine. Better buy those up now. We only have a little more than a thousand of each left…

So… more than a few of you would like to know exactly when pre-orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Tub of Happiness will open. Here are enumerated tidbits for you.

1. I’m putting a stake in the ground and saying “Next Thursday, September 20th, at 10am Eastern Time.” That gives you a week to plan, right?
2. If you are coming to Mountain-Con or Small Press Expo, you can place your pre-order there, including a pre-order for a sketch edition.
3. If you’ve got a really good excuse for why you can’t order a sketch edition inside a 24-hour window next Thursday, email howard.tayler or sandra.tayler at our gmail accounts, and we’ll try to find a way to accomodate you.

Let the deluge of email begin…

Schlock Mercenary: The Tub of Happiness is being sent off for printing this week. It is 240 pages long, including nine pages of what one trusted pre-reader called “the most satisfying bonus story ever.”

The full-color book includes all the strips from June 12th, 2000 through November 11th, 2001… that’s 507 days of Schlock, for just $25.00.

We probably won’t have books in hand for shipping until late November, but I’m very optimistic about being able to ship books in time for Christmas delivery, or any other end-of-the-year gift-giving you plan to do.

Did I say $25.00? The price for the book (not including shipping) is $25.00 US, but if you pre-order, it’s only $20. If you want to pre-order a sketch edition, that will be $30. We’re going to run things the way we did this time last year — if you want a sketch edition, you need to pre-order it during the 24-hour “window” right at the beginning.

Pre-orders are not open yet.

But they will open soon.

Watch this space…

I sat down to sketch out some notes for the next week of Schlock Mercenary (by “next week” I mean “the next week I need to draw,” not the next week you get to read) and realized two things:

1) the story appeared to be reaching one of the important arc-points I’d slowly been building to.
2) the next week of scripts to be written is for the last week in September.

In short, Schlocktoberfest 2007 seems nicely poised to take place exactly when it needs to, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t expecting this particular plot-point to be the one that fell on that most hallowed of months.

Hopefully everybody will look back at the current storyline, and think I’m some kind of a genius, the way I write these things so that everything falls into place. I’m here to tell you that I’m not a genius. I’m a hack who regularly prays for a miracle, and sometimes gets what he asks for.

On a related note: “Schlocktoberfest” is the most difficult piece of writing I do all year. Ordinarily I begin a book or an arc with an end-state in mind, and a few notions of how the characters will reach it. The “last page” of that book or arc is an indefinite thing, appearing only when I feel like I’m done. With “Schlocktoberfest,” however, the last page and the first page are 31 days apart (though I can fudge a little with the starting point), and whatever notions I may have about moving the story must be made to fit in that space.

It ain’t easy. I didn’t even TRY it in 2000. I screwed it up in 2003, and decided that the story I’d picked was too big for 31 days. In retrospect, I made the right decision – scary though dark-matter monsters are, they were too important to try to squeeze into a one-month arc.

In 2004 I did something new, and played a very ordinary story that ended darkly. In 2005 I had fun with a Really Big Fish (one of my favorites, though the first Schlocktoberfest is still the best IMO). In 2006 I had a great time using the whole month as a setup for a pun. But all of these were really difficult to write, and would probably have been better-written as stories if the 31-day constraint were lifted.

For 2007 I think I’ve got a great set-up, a solid place for the story to start and finish, and a fun concept. But I can’t deny that it’s going to be hard to do.

Back to work with me. These things don’t write themselves…