Blógünder Schlock

Thank you, everyone, for your generosity on my birthday. According to the final tally, I received three hundred and twenty-three postcards for my birthday.

As you can see, they wrapped from the top of the stairs in the picture on the right, around to the first wall I started posting them on, and then around again to the wall with the closet door on it in the photo below. Then they rounded yet another corner, where we managed to contain them with a wall-hanging. I had to pull way back to get them all in the shot.

Some of you very thoughtfully sent your cards “late” so that they could be postmarked on February 29th. That was a nice touch. Thank you! If anybody complains about how this update was late, I’ll just point them at you guys (anonymously, of course) and the fact that a few cards showed up as late as Monday, March 10th.

Sandra assures me that we’ll be scrapbooking these, so the kind words you’ve written and the pretty pictures you’ve sent will be available for me and my posterity for generations to come. Thank you.

I haven’t forgotten. Really. I’ve just been busy. Oh, and more cards arrived this week. So… you’ll get a postcard update soon.

Thanks for all the kind Birthday wishes, everybody. I’ve gotten tons of email and postcards, and had a fine birthday.

I don’t have time to put up an updated postcard-wall picture. I need to get back to work today. This Bonus Story isn’t writing itself.

I posted my thoughts on turning Forty over in my Live Journal. This morning my thoughts are the same, only tempered with “I shouldn’t have eaten that much sushi last night.”

Pleasure before business — last night I recorded a podcast with The GeekDads, who very graciously invited me to join them for the evening. You can find it at www.geekdad.com, or via iTunes. It’s called “Episode 13: Rule Number One - Pillage, Then Burn.”

On to business…

Pre-orders on the “Pillage, THEN Burn” T-shirt are drawing to a close. We’ve added 5XL shirts to the size matrix, but if you want one of those, the only way to guarantee you get it is to pre-order. If you ordered a 4XL and want to change your order, please email schlockmercenary@gmail.com with your order number and we can make the change.

We’re closing the pre-orders on March 1st, and will begin printing shirts the following Monday. At that point the shirts will not be available for regular orders for about two weeks.

We’re going to print about 20% more shirts than were pre-ordered (it’s called “re-investing the profits”) so we will have some of these available at conventions (including Chimaeracon and Ad-Astra), but let’s do the math for a moment… about 300 shirts have been ordered. That means there will only be 60 shirts in inventory. If you really, really want one, I suggest plunking down money now.

As a reminder, if you bought one of these from me at LTUE, there were curing problems. I owe you a new shirt. There are an even dozen of you out there (plus Matt Moody, who bought one out of the trunk of my car) and I’ve only heard from TWO of you. Certainly you’ve been doing your laundry, and have washed the shirt and discovered the fading problem by now! Email schlockmercenary@gmail.com with your name and address, and we’ll get you taken care of.

The postcards, as you can see from the picture to the right and the picture below, are starting to spill around the corners of the wall we started them on. I’m not sure how many there are… well over 100, though, which is nicely heart-warming.

I have two new favorites. Pictured on the right, you may notice a Koala card with a blue fiddly-bit sticking out of it. A yellow fiddly-bit might have indicated that this card had its own hypernet node. The blue is probably just an annie-plant. I have no idea what the Koala needs that for, but I know better than to argue.

Not pictured, because I keep playing with it — an actual birthday card featuring Captain Kirk and Mister Spock on the cover. The dialog on the front reads “Analysis, Spock. If all the candles on that cake were to be lit simultaneously…”

When you open the card you discover that it is electronic. Spock’s voice, sounding crisper than I think it ever did coming from a ’60s-era television, says ominously “Annihilation, Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation.”

As I said before, it’s not on the wall because I keep playing with it. Apparently somebody is easily amused.

I fell ill Monday afternoon. It cut my workday short. For the rest of the week I tried to muscle through it, propping myself up with piles of Vitamin C, caffeine, cold medicine, and mid-day sleep.

I’m still wiped out. I managed to get a very small amount of work done during my six-day work week: two pages of Bonus Story, and 2/3 of a week of comics. I’m grateful for the buffer. Here’s hoping the coming week goes a little better. I really, REALLY need to finish the Bonus Story and cover for The Teraport Wars so we can start printing books (and, by extension, selling books and paying the bills.) What I failed to get done, in spite of some aggressive convalescing on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, was get better. It’s frustrating, because usually any task I devote half a day to gets finished.

On a semi-related (and cross-posted from the Nightstar forum) note, We are very, very close to the end of Book 9: The Body Politic, which will draw to a close on Thursday the 28th. Book 10: I’d better Hurry Up And Name This Thing Or People Will Start To Suspect That I Make This Crap Up On The Run begins on Friday, February 29th… the day I turn 40.

Is it coincidence that Book 10 begins on the 10th Leap Day since my birth? Is there numerological significance to it? There MUST be…. otherwise I’m not just making this crap up on the run, I’m getting infernally lucky at the same time.

Enough of that. I’ll post more “wall-o’-postcards” updates, along with a link to this week’s Writing Excuses sometime Monday morning. For now, however, I’m chugging some Nyquil and going to bed.

With February 29th fast approaching, birthday postcards have been arriving in increasing numbers. Here’s a picture of the wall from before LTUE last week:

Now here’s a picture of the wall today.

Yes, I read every one of these. Thank you for all the pleasant wishes and kind words. Thank you as well for the pictures that make me wish I was living in some of these gorgeous, distant lands. (Fortunately for the family budget, we got a postcard from Utah, and I realized that my current home ALSO looks really good in pictures.)

It amused me to see some of these pictures accompanied by text like “it’s not much, but it’s home.” I think we all tend to forget how beautiful the world around us really is. Over time the marvelous becomes the mundane, or as the Roman satirist Apuleius said, “familiarity breeds contempt.”

Except I think he said it in Latin.

Here’s the first batch of postcards as seen taped to the wall in the front room of my house.

The postcards that came the furthest distance are probably the two from Japan down at the bottom. The postcard of the most distant landscape, however, would have to be the one of the icy surface of Europa in the upper-right. None of that is pertinent, however. What matters is the nice notes written on the back.

(If this were an episode of CSI, you’d be enhancing the photo and getting reflections of the view out of my front window. Fortunately, I know you can’t do that.)

As a reminder, if you’d like to send me a postcard for my birthday (turning forty on Februrary 29th), the address is:

Howard Tayler
PO Box 385
Orem, UT 84059

Today is Sandra’s birthday.

Each year on her birthday she posts a new short story she’s written. The latest one can be found here, and it’s about a muse in the shower.

I may be the inspiration for this, at least in part, because so many of my own muses seem to be plumbing-related, but the story is definitely all hers.

On a related note, words (especially those composed in a hurry before Church on a Sunday morning) cannot express the extent of my appreciation for this woman. Rest assured, without Sandra there would be no Schlock Mercenary, let alone books, posters, shirts, or other merchandise. She doesn’t just ship this stuff. She enables it.

I’m not sure whether I should give her credit for inspiring it or not… after all, it’s a story about some extremely disfunctional people who mean well, but who perform heroically-scaled acts of violence for money. That’s hardly the sort of thing you want to say was “inspired by the love of my life, my wife, and the mother of my children (who yes, are all the same person, even for Mormons.)”

Happy Birthday, Sandra!

From a response to a comment today in her Live Journal:

The necessity of eating is annoying. I wish we could just choose not to eat except for special fun occasions when there are cookies.

–Sandra Tayler

I love this woman.