Tag Archives: Merchandise

Retrospective Sketchbook: Two Weeks To Go!

“I think I’ll take up doodling as a hobby.”

I said that to Sandra twenty-six years ago, in March of 2000. Less than four months later I’d launched Schlock Mercenary online. My writing decent, if perhaps a bit dad-jokey. My art was really, really rough¹.

We’re doing a book about this.

You can back the project over on Kickstarter. If we hit our $30k stretch goal (not far off right now, it’s pretty likely we’ll get there) then the book will grow from 32 pages to 80 pages.

As of this writing we have just over two weeks remaining in the project. Click the link to get all the details, and to see some sample pages.

Sandra is in charge of this, because I dislike my early art enough to not want to touch it. I’m spending my time right now working on the bonus stories² for book 20, and that Kickstarter project won’t launch until I’ve made a lot more progress on them.

For right now, though, you can help us a lot by backing Doodling as a Hobby: The Retrospective Sketchbook of an Accidental Career. My art and writing have come a long way since March of 2000, but one thing that has remained constant—and constantly amazing—is the support and generosity of you fine folks who followed me on the trip.

———
¹ I’ve often said that the only way for my early art to suck any harder would be for us to raise atmospheric pressure.
² Yes, that’s “stories,” plural.

Structuring Life to Support Creativity

Sandra Tayler, whom you may know as the editor, publisher, project manager, and so much more behind Schlock Mercenary, is crowdfunding a book called STRUCTURING LIFE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/sandra-tayler/structuring-life-to-support-creativity

I can personally vouch for the principles and practices presented in this book, but that’s probably kind of obvious. Sandra has worked with many other people and organizations over the last decade, so this book is far, far more than just (!) the life experience of someone who wrangled a single cartoonist into profitability while managing her own career writing children’s books and short stories.

Follow the links above to read more about the project. It has funded, and just yesterday Sandra crossed the “we get to make an audiobook” stretch goal. The project closes in two days, though, so if you want to throw some momentum into it on the home stretch, now’s the time.

The Seventy Maxims Project

We’re reprinting the Seventy Maxims “defaced” edition, and the crowdfunding project for that wraps up in just under a week.

Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries (Reprint)
https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/hypernode-media-schlock-mercenary/70-maxims-of-maximally-effective-mercenaries-reprint

As part of this project I’m designing two posters, both of which will have all seventy maxims on them. Yesterday I spent a few hours tweaking various text attributes like kerning and quote height, and finished up the two-column version of the poster. It’ll be a 16″x20″ thing, and will look something like this…

If you want to get your hands on one of these posters, perhaps for the wall of your office, or maybe the local kindergarten, jump in on the Backerkit project today. We’ll be printing extras, of course, but backing the project is the only way to ensure that we set one aside for you.

And speaking of Backerkit… this project is an experiment, a stress-test of a new soup-to-nuts crowdfunding service, an alternative to Kickstarter. For several projects we’ve used Backerkit in conjunction with Kickstarter, because Backerkit makes fulfilment easier for complex projects. They’ve been around for a while, and we love working with them.

We still like working with Kickstarter, but it’s good to have an alternative—especially since Kickstarter briefly flirted with adding NFTs to their blockchain infrastructure, sending much of their community scrambling for other options. They’ve backed away from that ledge, at least for now, which makes us happy. Also, we are happy to be trying out a different service. We like having options.

Unsurprisingly, there are a couple of maxims that may apply here:

50: If it only works in exactly the way the manufacturer intended, it is defective.
30: A little trust goes a long way. The less you use, the further you’ll go.

(You, too, can cite maxims as if from memory… all you need is one of these fancy new posters on a wall where you can see it.)

The Two Chinooks

I finished painting the two Chinooks a couple of weeks ago, and have been busy layering stuff behind them for assorted desktop wallpapers and for the promised 8″x10″ print. Absent those layers, this is what the Goddess of Earth, Wind, and Plumbing looks like before and then after her temper-tantrum…

The Two Chinooks, by Howard Tayler

I’d write more about this project, but I have another project to write about, so I’m gonna move on to that update next.