Blógünder Schlock

Dunno if I’ll use it much, but here’s my twitter page. My cousin Kurt pressured me into this…

The first batch of new merchandise (based on old images, yes, but we’ve found new ways to sell them to you!) is ready for pre-order.

Let’s start with that old standby from January, Rule 37. It is now available as a T-shirt (plain white, or “ringer” white) with a Schlock Mercenary logo on the back. The print process used on these is akin to inkjet printing right on the shirt.

The resolution and color depth is wonderful, and we’ve washed samples with hot water and BLEACH (not that YOU’d ever do that) and there’s no noticable fading. I have a year-old shirt printed this way, and it still looks great fifty washings later.

You don’t want a T-shirt? Okay, okay. Here’s Rule 37 laid out on a mousepad. I know, I know… some of you don’t use mousepads. Lots of you DO, however, because optical mice don’t always agree with shiny table surfaces. The mousepad is printed the same way the T-shirt is, so the colors look really nice.

Tired of Rule 37? I understand. Maybe I can tempt you with “Petey’s Galactic Bath” on a mousepad. It can sit there under your deskrodent as a reminder to not let your sheer brilliance go to your head.

These three items are all on pre-order, and are all going to be printed by the same manufacturer here in Utah in the next couple of weeks. We plan to start shipping things out to you on or around May 20th, but it could happen sooner than that. Or a little later. We’ll keep you posted. Watch this space.

Some of you may have seen your posts disappear. This is because Akismet thinks you’re dirty spammers, and I need to teach it otherwise. I get a lot (a VERY lot) of spam, and the Akismet queue ends up quite deep.

So… if you post, and it doesn’t show up immediately, that means it’s been trapped. Email me, and I’ll de-spam it, teaching Akismet that you’re actually okay by me.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Fortunately this is MORE convenient than wading through the spam would be. We have 8,300 legit comments on 561 posts here, and Akismet has trapped 85,000 spam comments. Do the math: we’d be 10:1 under spam without it…

EDIT: in case you missed it, the original “filler strip” for April 1st, 2008 is thumbnailed here…

I went seven years, nine months, and twenty-one days without missing a strip. That’s not such a bad run. But I guess with all the convention travel, I neglected to finish the work on today’s installment. I’ve forgotten to upload before, but until now I’ve not forgotten to color.

I would have caught that if I hadn’t been so very, very tired all day.

Anyway, I’m still half-asleep, but I figure you fine folks will forgive an indulgence. I threw together a placeholder image and put it up (there’s a first time for everything) and I’m headed for bed. Please be patient, you’ll get the April 1st installment soon enough.

In fact, it’s probably already there. I mean, by the time you’ve finished reading this blog post, the animation should have cycled through to your precious Schlock Fix.

Happy All Fools’ Day.

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.

So… I’ve shown you the postcards, I’ve pimped the t-shirt… what NOW?

Today is also the launch of “Writing Excuses,” a weekly podcast featuring Brandon Sanderson, Daniel Wells, and Howard Tayler. Episode 1 is live today, and you’ll hear from us each week thereafter.

Our goals with “Writing Excuses” are threefold: we want to educate our listeners on subjects pertaining to writing, we want to entertain them, and we want to do it all in just fifteen minutes each week. Why so short? Why not a full 90-minute lecture? Because you’re in a hurry, and we’re not that smart.

You can read the latest Schlock Mercenary (as well as the latest of each of the Blank Label Comics) at the new-and-improved Blank Label Comics home page.

Our initial page layout (credit: Maggie, David Willis, and Me) was pretty good, but Elizabeth Dean (espoused to Greg Dean of Real Life Comics) took one look at it and sprouted a patch of grey hairs. Then she got to work.

Less than six hours later she had a new layout mocked up. Twenty-four hours after that, Greg had made her design live.

I have never seen this woman touch a page design without turning it into gold. She is Queen WebMidas, with a golden touch. In this case the gold comes in desaturated cerulean shades highlighted with shining Blank Label Orange, but it is gold nonetheless. It is gorgeous… kind of like the tri-color Black Hills Gold, only without Indian Burial Grounds or Mount Rushmore.

So… go have a look. Read all of the Blank Label Comics in one handy place.

Now then… here are some answers to common questions:

Q: What will this do to ad revenue?
A: The same thing RSS feeds do. It will dilute ad revenue slightly, while expanding the reach of the comics and increasing page-views overall. Ultimately, it’s OUR problem, not yours. This page is for readers to enjoy. If you feel guilty enjoying it, you can buy some merchandise someday.

Q: Can I have an RSS feed for this new page?
A: Hmmm… No. The page updates every ten minutes, and updated content (especially blog entries) may appear at any time during the day. If you want to be up-to-the-minute on all that stuff, the best way is to subscribe to individual Blank Label Comics RSS feeds. This page is a once-a-day trawl spot for people who don’t want to bother with all those feeds.

Q: But Schlock Mercenary doesn’t have a feed.
A: Yet. I’m working on that. It’s a separate project.

Q: Why is Real Life on top?
A: Because for now we all wanted it there. The vertical orientation is perfect. Eventually we may auto-rotate the position of the strips, but that’s a version 2.0 task.

Q: Shouldn’t there be plugs for your merchandise, and store links, and forum links, and all that?
A: You’re absolutely right. There should be. That’s a version 1.1 task, and to hear Greg bubble enthusiastically about it, some of that may be in place before this blog entry gets posted.

Q: Do you have plans to add any other comics to the lineup here?
A: No, but the architecture is flexible enough that it would be easy to do. Six seems like the right number right now.

Q: What happened to the Blank Label Comics blog?
A: You can find it at www.blanklabelcomics.com/blog. Yes, this probably broke a lot of trackbacks and pings. Sorry! We’ll look at getting it incorporated into the main page at some future point.

Q: I have a bug to report!
A: Email it to me, or use the “contact” link at the top of the Blank Label Comics home page.

Pre-Orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Tub of Happiness are closing Monday morning at 8:00am my time (GMT -700). The store will be closed for a few hours while Sandra runs the last of the pre-order reports, and then it’ll open back up… but any orders (including The Blackness Between or Under New Management) received after that time will not ship until December 12th. If you’re planning on ordering Schlock books this month, now really is the best time.

Everybody who has seen, handled, and/or read Tub of Happiness has had really nice things to say, which I admit has surprised me. After all, this is my artwork at its earliest and its worst. One reader said “Are you SURE these are the same strips I read on the web?” I assured him that they were. The only reason they look better is that the resolution is at least three times better, but that same argument cuts both ways — my mistakes are three times as sharp in print.

Another reader (and ardent supporter, I should add) said “I still can only say ‘wow,’ even though the cartoons are the same ones I’ve read in the archives. I especially liked the 24 hours before Schlock joined the Toughs.”

Oh, good. The Bonus Story works, then.

One of the guys who has been helping me down at the Keep (he feeds me books, and boxes ‘em after I sign ‘em) picked up Schlock Mercenary for the very first time with the store copy of The Tub of Happiness, reading it during the breaks. He kept laughing out loud, and repeating my seven-year-old punchlines back to me gleefully.

I guess this means that the whole book works. Which is good, because I’m not doing it over.

I keep meaning to update this blog, and then keep not doing it because the time I usually spend doing it I’ve been spending walking a few blocks in order to shed some particularly ugly pounds.

The good news is that five of those pounds have come off. The bad news is that all of the good ideas I usually have for blogging have been displaced by thoughts of putting one foot in front of the other. And then the Voices In My Head start yammering, and when I come back home I’m writing scripts for the strip instead of insightful, wry-and-dry commentary for this page.

I like it when the bad news is actually just another flavor of good news.

What with this being the first year of the new-and-improved(?) Daylight Savings dates, I suspect that the absence of an updated Schlock Mercenary comic at 11:00pm Eastern is nothing to worry about. If the strip isn’t here by midnight Eastern I’ll start hand-hacking pages.