Tag Archives: Schlock Mercenary

Announcements, Journal

February’s Projects

I’ve got a full plate this month. Aside from wrapping up the climactic bits of Schlock Mercenary: Delegates and Delegation (the current story online) I need to tackle the bonus story, the cover, and the marginalia for Force Multiplication so that we can send it to print.

Then there’s the substantial task list for the upcoming Schlock Mercenary role-playing game, designed by Alan Bahr, with lots of input from me. The core game stuff is done, and once we’ve got some art to show off we’ll start building a Kickstarter page. That campaign will likely go live sometime in mid-March, and will support the production of a very nice, fully-illustrated rule book, and some odds and ends that will make some of our peculiar (maybe even unique) game mechanics fast, intuitive, and hilarious.

I say “we” with regard to the art. I’ll be doing a few, goofy comic-type things in the book, but most of the artwork will be the sort of thing that you’d expect to see in a wonder-invoking, far-future, science-fiction RPG book. Full-color, fully rendered characters, weapons that look like they’d actually work, and vehicles that are more interesting than the things I dash off with a straight-edge and a circle template.  Think of it this way: Schlock Mercenary, the comic strip, is the canonical story, but the comic’s artwork is mere caricature. The RPG book will show you that universe more clearly, and give you and your players much better starting points for your flights of fanciful shared storytelling.

Back to the task list: I’m also featured pretty heavily in the programming of LTUE, the SF&F symposium here in Utah on February 12th, 13th, and 14th (Thurs-Sat.) and at the end of February I’m flying to Chicago to record more Writing Excuses Master Class sessions.

You might get a movie review or two this month. I’ve seen Strange Magic and Into The Woods, and I’ll be seeing Jupiter Ascending, but the real time sink is actually writing them up.

And speaking of writing, I’ve got a bunch of prose fiction on my plate as well, so I should finish writing this, and start in on some actual work.

Announcements

Sketches, Shopping, Shared Nightmares, and Schlock

I finished the last of the internationally-bound sketch editions early Sunday morning, and then took Sunday off. Today Sandra and Keliana will be shipping all the international packages, which means that unless there are postal issues in the destination nation, they’ll be arriving in time to be Christmas gifts.

Meanwhile, our store is still open, and there’s plenty of time for the delivery of gifts to folks in the United States. Pins, coins, and patches make great stocking stuffers, and for folks with office walls that need decoration, the 2015 Schlock Mercenary Monthly Calendar is kind of perfect. We still have the Munition Canister slipcases that hold the first five and the second six books for folks who own books, and want a handsome way to keep them upright without book-ends. (Note: the slipcases sell fast, and we can’t stock huge numbers of them because they take up a lot of space in our warehouse.)

If you’re considering taking the plunge for the first time, going all-in, as it were, we have an eleven-book bundle!

Since it’s not unlikely that you’ll be doing some shopping elsewhere for gifts this week (and by “elsewhere” I mean “Amazon“), you might consider starting your trip with this link. A portion of the proceeds from your purchase will help pay the bills here at Chez Tayler. It’s a small thing, but it adds up quickly on our end, and has gone a long way toward paying the bills in January and Februrary in past years.

Oh, hey! If you’re out at Amazon anyway, check out the SHARED NIGHTMARES anthology! It’s just $2.99, and features really bad dreams from a Hugo nominee, a couple of Campbell nominees, a Prometheus winner, and a New York Times best-seller. It’s also available here on Smashwords.

Me? I’ll be spending Cyber Monday scripting comics and sketching in books. It may be Schlock, but it still doesn’t draw itself.

Announcements

Shipping Update

The trucks* full of Massively Parallel and Munitions Canister 1 & 2 slipcases will arrive on Monday, and we’ve got the volunteers we need. Meanwhile, the calendars have already arrived, and the ones that can be sketched and shipped without books are queued up for me to work on. They’ll get packaged Saturday, and will go out the door on Monday. We’re still basically on track with this schedule I posted.

I’ve finished one week of comics this week, and need to finish a second before Saturday night. Today’s schedule: Blog (almost done!), pencil five rows of strips, take a ten minute break, then sketch 50 calendars. That gets me to about 1pm. From there, the schedule looks a lot like draw comics, breathe, sketch calendars, breathe, repeat. Maaaybe I’ll leave the house for treat food, but it’s far more likely that Sandra will forbid such distraction (she can’t get HER work done until I’ve finished MINE), and simply drop something delicious and paper-wrapped in front of me. Along with napkins, so I don’t get food on anybody’s calendars.

I’ll probably post a running count of completed sketches on Twitter. The next time THIS page gets updated it’ll probably have pictures of giant stacks of merchandise.

(*Note: Yes, more than one truck.)

Announcements

The Massively Parallel Shipping Schedule (Alternatively: “Why We’re Not Doing NaNoWriMo”)

The calendars are arriving here at Chez Tayler tomorrow (Wednesday, November 19th.) I have a few hundred sketches to do, and those will be queued up on my game table so I have stuff to do when I want to take a break from working on the comic itself.

(Yes, I take a break from work by doing different work. No, I do not have a workaholism problem. I work, I fall down, no problem.)

The books and slipcases will be arriving at the Hypernode Media warehouse sometime the following week, hopefully on a day where they do not collide head-on with Thanksgiving plans. Regardless, as soon as they’re in hand, the hundreds of to-be-sketched books will get queued up on my game table, and I’ll go straight through on those as quickly as possible.

This sequence of events, which features me as the prominent bottleneck (which in turn means that no, this operation does not feature enough processes running in parallel [and certainly not massively so]), means that the contents of the box you ordered will dictate when that box ships.

Here’s the schedule: 

Unsketched calendars (but no Massively Parallel books or slipcases) will go out starting on Wednesday, November 19th.

Orders with sketched calendars (but no Massively Parallel books or slipcases) will go out starting on Thursday, November 20th. The last of them should be out by Monday, November 24th.

Unsketched Massively Parallel orders (including those with slipcases, calendars, and book bundles) will start shipping sometime between November 25th and December 1st, depending on when the merchandise arrives. All non-sketched orders should be out the door by December 2nd.

Orders that include Massively Parallel sketch editions (including those with slipcases, book bundles, and sketched and unsketched calendars) will go out as soon as there are sketched books to go in them. They should start shipping by December 2nd, and the last of them should be out the door by December 9th. 

What does this mean for delivery in time for Christmas?

Per the USPS site, Domestic Priority-Mail orders will all arrive in time. We plan to ship them by the 9th, and USPS says we need to have them out the door by the 20th. No problem. The 11-book bundles will ship in two packages, though, so don’t panic if only half the books arrive. The rest are probably right behind them.

International Priority Mail: We’re going to attempt to fill these orders first, and according to USPS we should hit the delivery-by-Christmas dates for all packages except those going to Central and South America, and Africa. We’ll do what we can to move those to the very top of my sketch pile, but they have to be out the door by December 2nd.

This will be our biggest and most complex shipping event ever. The amount of material arriving at the warehouse, if stacked precariously upon a single, indestructible pallet, would be about 10cm lower than an Olympic high-dive (10 meters [forty-ish feet.]). Most orders contain at least two things, and across all orders there are exactly 80 separate inventory items to be queued up for inclusion.

We’ll get pictures. Also, we’re not going to build an Olympic high-dive in our warehouse.

Are we two weeks behind our original schedule? Yes. Yes we are. Funny story…

Both the calendars and the books were delayed by errors we caught and fixed in the proofs. The calendar error wasn’t that big a deal. The printer’s software munged four pages of the file, and they fixed it. It only cost us four days.

The book error, however, was a hair’s breadth away from disaster. One of the page images slid down during a copy-edit (totally our fault) and we didn’t catch it until after the pages were printed. Fortunately, we caught it before they’d glued bindings on any of the 5,000 bundles of pages, and we were able to have them reprint the final signature (16-page section) of Massively Parallel. It cost us about $1000, plus two weeks and three anxiety attacks.

We caught that one on the Friday night (Eastern Time) before the Monday morning (Hong Kong time) when 5,000 covers were scheduled to be attached. Which means the breadth of a hair is about 44 hours, or zero business days, and please please pick up the phone before you pick up the glue.

“Funny story” indeed.

And speaking of stories, as much as Sandra and I both love to write, NaNoWriMo hasn’t worked out for us in the past, so we didn’t even consider it this year. Those of you who are doing NaNoWriMo can lord it up over us all you want.