business

Cleaning Up for Shipping

By / May 1, 2018

Shipping season will begin soon. I thought it would begin in a couple of weeks, but yesterday I got word that the bulk shipment of RAM will be arriving sometime this week. Fortunately I’ve been working to prepare the warehouse, because we never fully cleaned up after Planet Mercenary shipping and then holiday shipping. In fact, my warehouse space looked like this just a month ago.

This state of affairs was a problem since “shipment of books” means 4-6 pallets and there was zero floor space for pallets of books to be dropped off. We hauled off fifteen big black bags of garbage, two carloads of cardboard, a dozen wooden pallets, and two more carloads of assorted other waste items. As much as possible I recycle and re-use, but it still ends up being a lot of work to remove things that are in the way so that we can make space. The good news is that as of this morning my warehouse looks like this:

Four pallets of books will fit easily into that space. As will the shipment of shirts which I’m expecting not too long afterward. Also the shipments of boxes that I will use to mail the shirts and the books. The physical spaces are ready for work. Now I’m preparing shipping lists, combining orders, and generally organizing so that when the books (and shirts) do arrive we can send them on their merry way to homes where they’ll be loved.

Planet Mercenary Signing Day

By / June 24, 2017 / 1 Comment

We had our big Planet Mercenary book signing today. It took six people four hours to get 800 books triple signed and then re-boxed.

Space in the warehouse is a bit tight for this kind of project right now. Kiki and Patch had to climb up pallets of books and walk along top of them to get from one end to the other. Fortunately they thought this was kind of fun.

Alan and Howard were lightning fast on getting the signatures done. I was slower, in part because I just sign slower, but also in part because we could have used a seventh person so I bounced out of my chair to help with book shifting quite a bit. Now we’re all stiff, sore, and tired. There are still some Seventy Maxims books to sign, but those are small and light, so we’ve transported them to the house to sign at our convenience.

I will spend the first half of next week tooling up and preparing. A few packages will go out during the early part of the week, but the first big shipping day is likely to be Thursday. It is just going to take me that long to get all the shipping supplies and invoices ready to go. Start up is always slow, but once we get rolling the packages will go out steadily.

For now, I need to rest. Resting is as important a part of getting things done as actually doing things.

Creating an Errata Document

By / June 23, 2017

A Roleplaying Game is an extremely complex thing to make. It is guaranteed that your finished product will have mistakes. Thus comes the necessity of creating of an errata document, which is a piece of paper that ships with the product and issues corrections for the mistakes that you’ve found. (Also guaranteed: you’ll find more after you’ve issued the errata document.) The process of creating this document means combing through questions and concerns that are submitted by customers who have read the book. It means I have to look closely at why my text confused them or feels broken to them. And, according to my anxiety, it shows all the ways I have completely and utterly failed as an RPG creator. (In my head, the failure is always mine despite the fact that Planet Mercenary is a hugely collaborative project.) Which, for a few people, the game may have. No single game is going to work for every person. But the balance of evidence is that the majority of our Kickstarter backers are pleased with what we’re delivering.

Hopefully once I’ve gotten the document complete, I’ll be able to step away from the errors and re-capture a feeling of accomplishment. I would really like to sit with a feeling of triumph and accomplishment for a while, instead of letting those emotions vanish into errata anxiety and shipping stress.

Books Arrived, Time to Do All the Things

By / June 21, 2017

The big shipment of Planet Mercenary books arrived today. That means it is time to switch gears and start sending packages out the door. My thoughts have been running a mile a minute since the moment I pulled up at Hypernode Headquarters and realized that I wasn’t going to have to sit around waiting for the truck, it was waiting for me. Cue flurry of me rapidly shifting the last few boxes so that pallets could take up that floor space. Thirty out-of-breath minutes later the delivery was done and the truck drove off.

Since then I’ve been making lists and scrambling to get things done. These are things I am tracking right now:

Preparations for the first shipping day: including finishing the errata document, getting 800 books triple signed, ordering the necessary shipping supplies, and mentally pre-organizing the backers into batches.

Preparations for ongoing shipping: I’m going to have to do many shipping days across several weeks. My kids are going to get tired of working and so I may need to hire neighborhood teens and organize that. I don’t know what will be needed. I’ll have to figure it out as I go.

Combining Deluxe Handbrain screen orders with Planet Mercenary orders: The first rush of emails is done, but responses are still coming in. At least now I have a practiced system for handling them so nothing gets lost. (Creating that system was a source of some stress as I used my brain as a bridge between three incompatible systems.)

Fulfilling on the last Planet Mercenary Kickstarter items: The Planet Mercenary backers will be getting their packages soon, which only leaves the Game Chief Secrets PDF which we promised. So I’ll be trying to squeeze in writing and editing time around the shipments. If anything slides it will be finishing up this, but I’d really like to end July with having delivered everything. I want August to be fully focused on the big events scheduled there. And in September I’d really like to shift gears into doing something new.

Fulfilling on the Handbrain Screen Kickstarter: The pressing of the screens themselves has been scheduled. I’ll need to approve them, pay the bill, and then wait for a truck. Then a second wave of shipping hits. Also there is the Adventure PDF that needs to be written and sent out.

Preparing for GenCon: This one is made so much easier by the crew I have in Indianapolis. They’re such amazing people and make running the booth possible. However much of my work for GenCon happens before we even get to the event. I’ve already done the hotel booking, flight purchasing, insurance purchasing, and arranged for electricity at the booth. Our official convention schedules are done thanks to the amazing folks at the GenCon writer’s symposium. Yet to do: make a new banner that features Planet Mercenary, ship Planet Mercenary books so we can sell them at the booth, double check on-site inventory and ship to fill any gaps, prep the cash register with new products, get the GenCon adventure ready for players, assist in lining up GCs to run games at GenCon, communicate with booth partners to make sure they have everything they need, prepare two solo presentations to give at the convention, and make up flyers and other promotional materials for the show. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. There is always something.

Preparing for the Writing Excuses Cruise:
It is in Europe this year. I’ve never been to Europe. There are packing preparations to make, power adapters to buy, flights to fret over, and planning for the adult kids who will be staying with the teen kids. The actual planning for this is not that hard, but the emotional footprint is big. Particularly since it has to be squeezed in between all of the other things.

Completing the next Schlock Mercenary book:
It can’t fall through the cracks. I really want to send it to print by early September so that I can have books on sale for Christmas. This means I have to finish writing the bonus story ASAP. I have to work with an artist to get the bonus story drawn. I have to get an introduction written. And Howard needs to do the cover and marginalia. Howard also needs to get way ahead on the buffer because of the upcoming travel.

Household stuff:
Apparently we’re out of groceries and this is a problem.

Thing I am really looking forward to: being able to complete things in the list above and not have to worry about them anymore. I’ve been pre-planning the Planet Mercenary shipping for the last eighteen months and I finally get to do the thing.

Planet Mercenary Advance Copies

By / June 15, 2017 / 1 Comment

Howard Tweets:
Three copies of the @PlanetMercenary RPG book arrived just now. It’s now officially a real thing.

The package was delivered while @SandraTayler was out running an errand. I opened it because I couldn’t NOT open it. Then I took pictures.

When she got back, I said “there’s a package for you on the counter.” Her reaction, which I only saw from behind, was fascinating.

I can only describe it as “There is a giant spider poised to pounce, and I’m in range, and it’s exactly the spider I always wanted.”

So I guess I’m glad I did the box opening because her having that reaction while holding a knife would have been scary for me.

Howard’s spider description was right on the nose. I was looking straight at the book for a moment before I realized what it was. We hadn’t gotten a shipment notification, so I wasn’t expecting them today. Then I froze and for a moment I was afraid to touch them, while simultaneously wanting to snatch it up and hug it. Because, what if it hurt me? What if I picked it up and found that there were huge errors that made the book unsellable and instead of being a triumph the whole thing was a massive failure? (Anxiety is not logical.) So it took an act of will to pick the book up. And to flip through the pages, but then I could breathe again. Because the books are beautiful both visually and to the touch.

I tweeted some replies to Howard’s spider tweet:

This is almost exactly what it felt like from the inside.

Brain wouldn’t parse and when it did I was almost afraid to touch the book, because what if it wasn’t right?

But then it was right, so I cried a little bit. And I’ve been carrying around the book ever since.

I’ve done so many pit-of-despair moments over this book, pushed so hard, gave up so many other things, and now it is real.

The bulk shipment can’t come fast enough. I want to send this out to the backers.

Naturally one of the first things we did was reach out to Alan Bahr and tell him to come get his copy. Until the bulk shipment arrives, we only have three. One for Howard, one for me, one for Alan. He came right over and we sat and talked for a couple of hours. Some was about the book we were finally getting to hold. Some was about GenCon coming soon. Some was about splatbooks and expansions that we’ll want to put out for the game in the next couple of years. And some about other stuff. As Howard tweeted afterward:
I’m not sure whether or not @AlanBahr enjoys coming over to my house because each time he leaves he has at least three new games to write.

Me & Alan: Alan: “Ugh, now I’m going to have to write that.” Me: “No, the point is that—” A: “Stop talking you’re just making more work.”

*Alan flees* Me: “Wait, there’s more!” *Car won’t start* Me: “Ahem.” *waves distributor cap* Alan: “aaaaauuuughh” *dies*

Okay, those last two were comedic storytelling for effect, but Alan really does end up with more games to write. However I think that a trip to the grocery store might give Alan more games to write. His brain just works that way. Alan has been fantastic to work with. As were our artists, our graphic designer, and editors. It takes a lot of people to make a book like this.

I’m still carrying around the book and petting it occasionally. But as soon as I finish up this post, I need to find my focus and get back to work. There is still much to be done to bring this project to final completion.

Warehouse Day at Hypernode Headquarters

By / June 6, 2017


I showed you this photo the other day. It is how the warehouse looked before we put in hours of work today. Here is what it looked like after:

It is a little hard to see, but from the floor the difference is significant. I now have space for up to ten pallets of books. Or I will once I haul off that stack of old pallets. With the shifting done, we got to work bagging components:

One of the secrets to an efficient shipping is to bundle things in advance. Every single order at the Company Commander and Commodore levels get a little white bag containing 4 pins, 1 coin, 1 set of dice, and 1 deck of cards. They also get a padded envelope containing their Seventy Maxims book and Game chief screen. So when time comes to box orders, instead of needing to grab ten different things for each package, we only have to grab three: book, padded envelope, little white bag. Additionally, the bundling also provides some useful padding making it less likely that things will get damaged in transit. Today we assembled almost 800 little bags. We need to assemble 1200 more exactly like these. Then we’ll assemble a pile of bags for the backers who included RiPP tokens in their order. The RiPP tokens fit into the little bag too. The bag itself is a bonus that we didn’t tell backers they are getting. It is a small thank you from us for supporting the project and being patient while we got everything done.

Lots of work still remains. I’ve only got a few weeks until the books arrive.

Notes from the Editing Cave

By / February 7, 2017

I’m still here. I’ve just been head down on the Planet Mercenary project.
23 Sections in the book

Sections 1-4 completely laid out
Sections 5-6 in layout
Sections 7-10 need a final editing pass from me before layout
Sections 11-14 need a final pass from me before being handed off to our editor
Sections 15-19 Howard has some final writing to do in these chapters
Section 20 currently being edited
Section 21 needs some writing from Howard
Section 22 currently being edited.
Section 23 index, glossary, etc which will start when layout is done.

My goals: make sure that everyone always has something to be working on. I don’t want layout guy waiting on me. I don’t want editor waiting on me. I don’t want Howard waiting on me. This means task swapping a lot.

I’m also conferring with artists to fill the remaining art gaps. It is hours of intense focus work every day. But by next week my schedule should begin to open up. I will be done with the mechanics heavy portions of the book. The remainder is cool worldbuilding stuff upon which players can build fun adventures, or Schlock Mercenary fans can just have fun reading.

The whole thing is visibly closer to being done. Yet in the middle of each day it feels like I’ll never be able to do all I need to do. And sometimes fatigue whispers to me that I’ve done it all wrong, everything is ruined. So I take a breath and I dive back in, because ruined or not, I have promises to keep.

Oh, and the Defaced Seventy Maxims books arrived yesterday, so there are 1000 packages to ship. I have that in front of me too.

Working in the Warehouse

By / December 19, 2016 / 5 Comments

The shipment is expected the first week of January. Two pallets, one thousand pounds. It is a small shipment by our usual standards, but the warehouse space wasn’t organized to receive it. I still had four pallets of Force Multiplication sitting in the middle of the floor. They needed to be combined into two pallets against a wall. Then there were the slipcases, four pallets across, three pallets high. All of those slipcases needed to be relocated into the upstairs section of the warehouse. They’re the only thing we have which is light enough to go up there. Even with light boxes, the work piles up when there are 400 boxes and a set of stairs involved.

I drafted my children. These days they are all adult sized. I’ve arrived at a point where I house my own work crew. I could have just said “this business pays our bills, you will help.” But I sweetened the deal by offering to pay them all by the hour. Saturday around noon, we piled into the car and set to work.

The first twenty minutes are always full of squabbling. They don’t squabble with quite the vigor that they used to, but in the opening minutes of a job like this, no one quite knows their job. People get into each others way and they grouch a bit. During those twenty minutes, I sometimes wonder if I would have been better to get outside help. Then they found their rhythm. They began to daisy chain boxes to the bottom of the stairs. Then daisy chain again to get them up and stashed. They learned how to toss boxes and catch them. They challenged each other, trying to work faster than a sibling could keep up. They laughed. When physical limitations made the work end before all the boxes were moved, all the kids said they wanted to come back and finish the job.

We went again today. Again it took twenty minutes to find our rhythm. And for the warehouse to warm up enough that they stopped complaining about the cold. Kiki had showered right before, so we had to take an old Schlock shirt and tie it onto her head as a makeshift hat to keep her head from freezing. Gleek decided that merely stacking boxes wasn’t quite good enough. So I now have a lovely box fort upstairs. Patch even made a cannon from an old piece of metal duct that was laying around.

At the end of the work, we could all see how much space we’d made. I’ll have plenty of room to receive my pallets of books, and the second (much larger) shipment that is due in February. The next big task is to get rid of thirty wooden pallets that we have stacked on the floor. That’s a job for a truck or a trailer.

Moving all the boxes inspired the kids. All four of them jumped on their computers to play a shared game of Minecraft. They’ve been at it for four hours now. I can hear them calling out to each other and laughing. Playing together comes easily and naturally for people who have worked together. I keep forgetting that. My kids are likely to be conscripted as work crew more often. I think they’ll be good with that.

Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

By / November 14, 2016 / 29 Comments

We will be releasing two editions of this book. Kickstarter backers are being given the option to choose which edition they want. This page is designed to give them information so that they can choose. If you are not one of the Planet Mercenary Kickstarter backers and are interested in pre-ordering one (or both) of these books, you can place your pre-order here.

cover-compare

The Pristine edition of the Seventy Maxims book has a cover that looks new and interior pages which are crisp and clean to read. The paper for the pages is actually off-white in color and has a nice texture. This is the ideal version for introducing friends to the maxims without confusing them with the character handwriting. It is also ideal if you want to do your own handwriting and notes either by yourself or with a group of friends.

The Defaced edition of the Seventy Maxims book has a cover which shows rust, gouges, and dents from bullets. The interior pages look aged and stained. There are handwritten notes around the maxims which were written by various characters from the Schlock Mercenary comic strip. The Defaced Edition is an in-world artifact. It originally belonged to Karl Tagon, was passed to his son Kaff Tagon, and also went through the hands of Captain Alexia Murtaugh and Sergeant Schlock. This version is ideal for the fan of the comic who wants to laugh at in jokes and gain additional insight into some of the characters.

Here is the front endpage of the Defaced version.
endpage-defaced

And here are some comparisons of Pristine pages to Defaced pages.
m44-compare

m27-compare

I personally love both editions of the book and am glad that we are able to offer both.

Progress Update 10/28/16: Kickstarter surveys have all been sent. I’ve written a Kickstarter Progress report. I’ll let replies collect over the weekend and start updating orders next week. That is also when I’ll take a count so I know how many of each book to order from the printer.

Progress Update 10/31/2016: I’ve gone through the Forward Observer pledges and either update the orders or sent email. This level has 173/340 backers responding. Next I get to do math to calculate how many of each type of book I should order.

Progress Update 11/14/2016: I’ve gone through all pledge levels to mark who wants Pristine and who wants to stick with Defeaced. The one exception is the Company Commander level (the largest number of backers) where I’m still working to update all the orders for people who’ve picked Pristine. For people who have requested to add to their order or split shipping, I’ve contacted the Forward Observer and Air Dropped Grunt Levels. This is, by far, the most complicated portion of the process. I’ll be tackling it in small to medium chunks. First priority this week is to finish the files for the Defaced edition and send them off to print. The Pristine edition is already approved and in process.

When a Project Doesn’t Work

By / October 5, 2016 / 6 Comments

mistakes

We made a really hard business decision this week. I’m still sad about it. Short version: Although I tried hard for more than six months, we can’t make the version of the Seventy Maxims books with handwritten annotations look anything but cluttered. The maxims get lost in the multi color handwriting and that is a problem because the maxims are the heart of the book.
Full backer announcement can be seen here:
Kickstarter Project Update #36

I’m sad because I fell in love with the stories and jokes created by those notes. I’m sad because I know that this decision disappoints some people. Yet I know that the clutter of notes would have frustrated and disappointed other people. I like the idea of creating clean, crisp books so that fans can add their own notes and experiences. I’d love nothing more than to see books that had been lovingly aged, scribbled in, and turned into expansive lists of additional notes and corollaries. Perhaps we’ll even set up a gallery so people can share images of what they have done. I’d kind of love that. There may be a time out there in the future where I’m able to be nothing but happy about the decision, but today I am sad.

Disappointing people is very hard for me. It punches huge anxiety buttons, or maybe very small buttons that are hooked up to giant, churning anxiety generators. I’ve spent a lot of energy in the past couple of days just trying to quell anxiety so that I can function. I’m also trying to figure out what I actually think and feel over the cacophony of “you have completely failed, you always fail, everything in your life is now permanently doomed.”

When I was talking with my daughter Kiki about this during one of her college check-in calls, she asked “Are you okay? I know how much time you spent on this.” And she is right. I spent more than a hundred hours getting all the handwriting, putting it into place, re configuring it so that I could hand it to our book designer (“re configuring” involved scissors, tiny pieces of paper, and double sided tape), then taking it back from the book designer when I realized the quantity of back and forth that Howard and I would need to do. There were the hours I spent prepping pages and sitting with my handwriters so that they would know what to write and where. I had each note written multiple times in different ways so that I had options for editing. After scanning the handwriting, I spent hours tweaking images for readability. I increased spaces between words, or decreased them. I replaced letters (or entire words) that were illegible with another version of that word written by the same person. I then went back to some handwriters and had had them re-write words, draw arrows, or write additional notes. Repeat all the editing steps. There are 320 images for those handwritten notes, each edited and placed individually.

So much work. Maybe I’m a little sad about those hours, but the thing that eats at me is we could have sent the book to print months ago if only we’d been able to see the solution before this week.

Ultimately the requirements of the project weren’t compatible with each other. We needed real handwriting because handwriting fonts are more sterile and far more difficult to tell apart. Unfortunately real handwriting always has readability issues. We needed multiple colors of pen so that readers could tell which character wrote what. But the multiple colors make the pages look jumbled up so that readers don’t know where to start. No matter what we did, we couldn’t make it so that the maxims drew the eye first. Which meant that people would read the handwriting before they’d read the text that the handwriting was responding to. Even while editing I had to train myself to read maxim first, then commentary, then notes. Some of the pages worked beautifully. Some were a mess no matter what we tried. Yet we couldn’t just eliminate the messy pages because some of them were key elements in a story through-line or a set up for a joke later.

Fortunately, all of the hard work is not lost. We’ll release a PDF version to our backers so that they can see what might have been, if only we could have made the different elements of the concept work with each other instead of against each other. And some of them will say “yeah, I can see why you chose not to print this.” Others will say “I’m so sad you didn’t print this, it is exactly what I wanted.” Both of those people will be right. This decision we’ve made is simultaneously exactly what needs to happen and also a disappointing creative choice. My brain keeps telling me that it is so close, surely if I just worked at it for another hundred hours I could make it brilliant. I don’t have those hours. I don’t have that energy. And the backers have already waited far past the delivery date we originally announced. I have a huge responsibility to deliver to them. I can’t let them down. Which means we’ve chosen the best path forward. I’m just sad that I couldn’t force there to be a better path.