Blógünder Schlock

If you didn’t pre-order your Schlock book because you wanted to wait until after Sandra and I had figured out how to mail things, the wait is over.

Head on over to this page and buy your book, or books. But be warned… these aren’t autographed or sketched. Those books were for the “early adopters,” those pioneers on the leading edge of dead-tree Schlock consumption.

We’ve shipped over 1600 packages, and less than 2% of them were problematic. In those cases we’ve shipped out additional books at no charge. We’ve also switched from bubble-pack mailers to non-bendable book mailers, so it’s almost infinitely less likely that your local postman will fold it in half to fit it in your mailbox.

Wondering whether the book is worth it? Ask around. We’ve got a lot of happy, happy customers.

Sorry for the confusion… I’ll be re-opening the store for book orders on June 1st, which is tomorrow as of today, but was not tomorrow as of yesterday.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled impatience.

–Howard

I have massive piles of email to wade through, thanks to 60 consecutive hours of being offline. Hidden in there somewhere are (probably) some book ordering or shipping problems.

I’ll be re-opening the “store” for book orders sometime tomorrow, and triaging my email at the same time.

I’ll make this quick:

1) Don’t see this film without first seeing the prequels.
2) It is a very entertaining, dramatic, and satisfying film.
3) Those who are complaining about it do so largely because of “canon” issues. I’d say more, but I don’t want to spoil it.

That said, the meta-story behind these three films has gotten stale for me. The X-men film franchise has focused almost entirely on themes of acceptance, definition of “other,” and thinly veiled political references. That they’ve worked character development, drama, and solid action into the mix shows brilliance, but come on… we did three movies about superheroes in which the “bad guy” was “fear of people who are different.” It’s high time to pick a new theme.

X3 is worth seeing, and all three X-men films stand together well. Hopefully they’ll take the franchise someplace else, next… like letting it lie fallow for a few years, or maybe focusing on just one or two of the heroes in a story that is a little bit less grand in scope.

I’m back from CONduit. It was great. Adding to the greatness — Sandra and I got to go together, and I did not touch a computer or in any way interact with the Web for 60 consecutive hours. I think that’s a record for this year, I do.

It’s bedtime. Tomorrow I’ll spend most of the day with Sandra as we retrieve our children from Pocatello. Buffer-fu begins again on Tuesday. Work on the next book begins on Thursday. I need to catch up on some sleep now.

CONduit is this weekend. I’m having laptop issues, so I may not blog much from the event, and I won’t be answering my email at all.

The website is here. The event is in Salt Lake City. I will have a very few numbered sketch editions for sale ($25), and I’ll have “plain old” books for sale ($15) into which I can put non-numbered sketches.

Hopefully I’ll see you there!

If you ordered a sketch edition, or if you were unfortunate enough to get upgraded by me to a sketch edition (usually because I recognized your name, and remember owing you a favor), then it is DEFINITELY in the mail as of Thursday morning. I finished the last of the on-hold sketch editions this afternoon, and right now they’re all in mailers, ready to go to the post office first thing in the morning.

Note — ALL of these are US orders. Worldwide and Canadian orders went out on Friday or Saturday. I figured that since those folks paid three times as much as everybody else for shipping, we ought to get them in the mail first.

Now then… a few of you have complained about the state in which your books arrived — in at least two cases well-and-truly mangled. I need you to do something for me: email me your paypal reciepts, so I can send you a replacement. I’m serious about this — I want people to know that they can trust Howard Tayler and The Tayler Corporation to ship good stuff, and to guarantee at least some level of satisfaction (no amount of re-sending will fix the misspelling of the word “mercenary” on the inside cover, I’m afraid). A few of you have posted your complaints in the previous thread, and I’ve taken the liberty of sending email to the address you used to register here on the blog. I have yet to hear back from any of you. In one case, a reader wept at the fact that his/her dog mangled the book after the postman left it within reach. I’ll replace that book, too, just as soon as I know where to send it.

And because you’ve asked, here are answers to the frequently asked questions:

Q: Hurry up with the next book! When is it coming? When can I preorder it.

A: I assure you, I’m hurrying. Work will begin in earnest next week. We want to be able to begin shipping it in early November. Pre-orders will not open until I’ve seen the press-match, though.

Q: When will regular ordering open back up for Under New Management?

A: June 1st.

Q: Will you ever put the first 1000 strips in print?

A: Absolutely. Pending the success of Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between (the book we plan to ship in November 2006), I’ll start work on Schlock Mercenary: Step Away From The Tub of Happiness sometime in January of 2007. That volume and its companion (currently untitled) will be much larger than the current books. Hopefully by November of 2007 we’ll have all 1000 early strips packed into two books. I don’t know what the price will be yet, and I’m not going to pre-announce anything else about this project until I’ve got a solid handle on SM:TBB.

Q: SM:TBB?

A: It’s an abbreviation. SM:UNM, SM:TBB, and SM:SAFTToH are all abbreviations you have my permission to use.

I totally missed it. Yesterday, May 23rd, was the first anniversary of the formation of Blank Label Comics.

Read up — it’s been a busy year for us (even if I was only there for about half of it).

For the record, the success of the current Schlock Book is due very, VERY largely to Blank Label Comics. Steve Troop is the only one who made the credits, but ALL these folks helped out, including helping me hook up with the right printer.

Happy Birthday, guys!

I have it on good authority that books have begun arriving. If you live in a major city on the West Coast, you’re probably already reading the book, or will be tomorrow. I’ve heard from Steve Troop in Los Angeles — he got his books today, and they went out on Friday afternoon around 5pm.

I completed another 30 or so sketch editions after letting my chiropractor slam my neck, back, and shoulder into a reasonable semblance of alignment. Seriously — I walked out of his office feeling better than I’ve felt in weeks. I’m going to try not to overdo it, because I’ve got a convention on Friday, but I THINK I can get the last of the books in the mail before then. I’ll have to push, but I think it can be done.

If you’ve gotten your book, I’d love to hear from you.

There’s so much that isn’t getting done, lately. For instance, I need to be plugging some of my advertisers.

Have a look over there in the left side-bar, in the box labeled “BlogAds”… See the fancy lasers? I saw one of the green ones at a convention a while back — the guy wielding it was popping soap bubbles. The really powerful ones are pricey, but with those you can pop helium balloons.

You should also look at Baen Books new online magazine, Jim Baen’s Universe. You’re already reading great science fiction online — if you join Jim’s Universe Club you can read stories that unfold a lot faster than one row of panels per day. I’m a big fan of lots of Baen authors (one of them wrote the introduction to Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management), and as far as I can tell, all their work is available as ebooks.

Finally, in that same vein, 365 tomorrows provides a daily fix of online SF. This advertiser is brand new, so I haven’t had much of a chance to sample it. Try it out and let me know what you think.