The Schlock Mercenary Kickstarter for books 14 and 15 has cleared another stretch goal, and backers who get those two books now get electronic versions of The Howard Tayler Retrospective Sketchbook and An Honest Death And Other Stories at no additional charge.

We only have three covers pictured because we’re a little surprised to have gotten this far.

The project also unlocked add-ons for five new Schlock Mercenary universe challenge coins, and a sixth coin which is a key fob version of the Maxim 70 coin.

The final stretch goal is out there a bit. It’s an R&D goal, and it’s about $13,000 away.  If we reach it, I’ll write a novel in the Schlock Mercenary universe.

I’m probably going to write it anyway, but with a proper budget I’ll also edit it, polish it up, and Sandra and I will explore ways to publish it. Perhaps it will get its own Kickstarter. Maybe we’ll shop it around with editors (or get an agent and have them do that) so that people with an existing infrastructure for prose can handle the heavy lifting.

The novel will definitely happen if we reach $125k. But if, between now and 6pm Eastern Time on Friday we reach $115k, I’ll make the first chapter available to backers at no charge.

And because were within just $3,000 of that goal already, I’m making the prologue available to everybody right now.

The Schlock Mercenary Kickstarter for volumes 14 and 15 of the long-running comic space opera has funded to a level where it will include a short fiction collection of non-Schlock Mercenary stuff.

I said that last week.

Last night it funded to the point that we can design and print some new challenge coins, and that particular stretch goal is just $5k short of the one which follows, the Howard Tayler Retrospective Sketchbook. We’ll put that together (PDF only, at least for now) if we hit the $110k mark, but we need to reach that goal by 6pm Eastern Time on Friday.

As of this writing we’re less than $4k away.

The book would include some of the art of which Howard is proudest, the work where he feels he really leveled up, and was on his game. It will also include some of his very worst work, because the point of the book is to show eighteen years of progress¹. And obviously we’ll be including lots of insightful, amusing, and self-deprecatory commentary².

You have two days to get in on this project, and it won’t take very many of you getting in on it to ensure that you’re all getting four books instead of just the original two.

¹ As I’ve said before, my progress over eighteen years isn’t that amazing. In eighteen years you could make a new human from scratch and then teach them to draw better than me.
² You want self-deprecatory? Here goes: The best reason to NOT back the project right now is to ensure that a generation of artists doesn’t get this PDF and learn to draw like Howard does, a catastrophe which would set the entire art form back about two hundred years.

The Kickstarter for Schlock Mercenary books 14 and 15 closes next Thursday. Our final three stretch goals are within reach, and but the very last one might be particularly interesting to you.

Remember those amorphs from the Martian circus, the ones who teamed up with Jud Shafter to rescue Lunesby? They’ve been having their own adventures…

The stretch goal is for R&D: if we meet the $125k mark we will be able to budget enough time for me to write a novel, sort of a pulpy adventure-mystery thing, about Shafter’s Shifters. Think “Doc Savage” meets “Dirk Gently,” with amorphs.

We won’t be delivering the novel as part of this Kickstarter. That would slow down the delivery of the two three books already promised. It will be its own project, available for pre-order or project-backing sometime in 2019. And yes, if the book does well enough, there could be more of them.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve got one week left on the current project, and we’ve already funded sufficiently for some cool stuff like Maxim 70 Key Fobs and short story collections.

The remaining stretch goals—JSC and Sanctum Adroit Coins, a Sketchbook Retrospective PDF, and the Shafter’s Shifters R&D—are still just goals, and they’re not things we can reach without your support. Click through to the Kickstarter and join us!