Sergeant In Motion: Schlock Mercenary Book 20, will be the last book in the Schlock Mercenary “mega-arc,” the unbroken¹ string of 7,300-ish² days of daily comics airing here at schlockmercenary.com. At that point the continuity of the Schlock Mercenary universe will include those twenty books, assorted bonus stories (which appear in the volumes in print), the Seventy Maxims book, and the Planet Mercenary RPG materials.
Many of you may be asking (and indeed, many of you have already asked) “what comes next?”
Good question.
The answer requires a bit of cold, calculated business stuff. See, it’s much easier to sell a collection of stories in print when you can tell a potential buyer that the collection is complete. So no matter what comes next, it won’t make the twenty-book story feel incomplete. I’ll be leaving lots of room for readers (and RPG players) to tell their own stories about what comes next for such characters as survive the events of this final book.
That sounded a bit more ominous than I meant it to. But only a bit.
Also, all I’ve done is answer the question “what DOESN’T come next?” and that’s not what anybody is asking.
In the face of a crassly commercial decision about what NOT to make (and let’s be blunt here—between the words “schlock” and “mercenary” there is a broadly telegraphed justification for me to be crassly commercial) I need to give people a reason to keep showing up. So here is a bulleted list of things that will definitely be here after Book 20 wraps.
- Sense of wonder
- Witty dialog
- Punchlines
- High stakes adventures
- Interesting characters
- Schlock
- and Schlock will still be a mercenary
It’s far too soon to go into much detail about any of this. I have a book to finish, and it would not be overstating things to say that I’m feeling a bit of pressure to brilliantly stick the landing after spending twenty years tumbling through the air pretending I know what I’m doing.
¹ Past results are no indication of future performance. I plan to not miss any daily updates during book 20, but blah blah mice men etc.
² June 12th of 2020 would be day 7,306 of Schlock Mercenary, and that date falls in about the right place for me to be ending a book. Dates aren’t important though. The story says when it’s over, not the calendar.
The signing is complete, but I still need to sketch in around 1500 books. The sketching is complicated by the fact that we want to ship packages as soon as they come ready, and almost all of the sketched-book orders contain two books. Oh, and people get to choose which sketch they want, from a list of about a dozen for each book.