Signing, Sketching, and Shipping

Your pre-orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Sharp End of the Stick will begin shipping this week. Today, in fact, we'll be sending out anything and everything that doesn't require a sketched book in the order. Tomorrow afternoon I begin sketching books in earnest, and Wednesday the first of those orders will go out the door.

We're doing it a little (read: "a lot") differently this time. Instead of a single, massive shipping event at the end of two weeks of sketching, we're shipping things as they come ready. I'm doing all the signing and sketching at home instead of at Dragon's Keep and all the packages will be leaving from my house. In theory this lets us avoid some needless shifting of boxes, and allows us to finish faster. In practice this is going to crowd my children and their friends right out of my living room, which is going to be completely dominated by the process between now and the 14th.

If things go dark, if you stop hearing much from me on this blog, or via other social media, it's not because I'm at BEA will all my cool author-friends. It's because I'm terribly busy helping Sandra and her minions send you your pre-ordered books.


Speaking of pre-orders, "Schlock Mercenary: Capital Offensive," the board game, which some eleven hundred of you helped kickstart last November and December, is leaving the manufacturer in Germany on June 15th. Fulfillment of your orders will begin as soon as the container arrives here in the States. There was a layout error that didn't get caught until late in the process, and it delayed manufacturing by about three weeks. 

I'll post more about this in mid-June. We will definitely have copies of the game available at both GenCon Indy (Indianapolis) and WorldCon 70 (Chicago) in August. (Note that this is NOT currently available from the Schlock Mercenary Store. We don't get to play retailer for this until sometime after convention season is done.)

Right now it's Monday morning, and I have the best job in the world. It's time to get back to work.