business

Schlock Mercenary is 10 Years old today

By / June 11, 2010

Ten years ago today the first Schlock Mercenary strip went up on the web. Howard had only been drawing for a couple of months. I still considered the whole project a nice hobby for him. I supported it, because I believe it is good for people to have hobbies, but I had not yet bought into the vision. I had no idea that this one little strip on the web was the beginning of so many dreams fulfilled. I had no idea of all the work ahead of us, or of the things I would need to become to help the project succeed.

A couple of years ago I had a conversation with a neighbor in which I talked about the things I was doing. She sighed and said “It must be nice to have time to chase a dream. With three little ones, I hardly know what mine are anymore.” I pondered that statement later and realized that not only was I living a life which allowed for chasing dreams, I was actively catching them and putting them into my pockets. This was made possible because of Schlock Mercenary. In fact, some of these dreams could not even have existed without Schlock Mercenary to stand on.

So today is a day for me to stand up and say thanks to Howard. His dream, his work, his diligence, all paved the way for me to become who I am and live the life that I have. I really love my life, even the parts that are hard. Howard helps me with the hard bits, but I owe him thanks for that every day not just once per decade.

It is also a day for me to thank all of the Schlock Mercenary fans out there everywhere. You came and you laughed. You wrote emails to us which helped us get through the emotional lows. You shared the comic with your friends and co-workers. You said nice things when the words of others stung. We could not be where we are without all of you. Without the fans, this comic would have withered and died long ago. So thank you. I hope you’ll stick with us for the next ten years.

Short updates

By / June 10, 2010

This week I have been focusing on getting myself and the kids out of the house more. It is working. We’ve been to a park, a church activity, and gone swimming. I’m beginning to fulfill the promises I made to the kids about how this summer would go.

This week I am also prepping for shipping. Janci and I sorted invoices. I’ve got all the t-shirts and will be folding them tomorrow too. I even placed my first orders for shipping supplies. Next week there will be more invoice sorting. Things are lining up so that we can do the shipping in mid-July.

Howard is working hard as always, trying to rebuild the buffer that took a hit from finishing the book and multiple convention appearances. We’re headed into the home stretch on the current story arc and Howard is placing himself under significant pressure to get it right. I have every confidence in him. I recently re-read the whole story and I kept being amazed at all the little details that he kept track of and brought back around. I was there with him the whole time, reading scripts as he finished them, but I frequently get confused or forget details. But the story really works and is going to be a good book. It is also going to be a really big book.

Our summer life rhythm is creaking along, not perfect, but more-or-less functional. The chore lists need to be tweaked because I can see which jobs are not on anyone’s list. Speaking of chore lists, house chores need to figure more prominently on my to do list as well. After that I can figure out how to give myself quiet spaces in the day. The trip to the park last Tuesday gave me some hints. We were there for two hours after dinner, and for most of it I sat and wrote on my laptop. Evening trips to the park may become a staple of this summer.

Endless Saturday Afternoon

By / June 4, 2010

So far the summer feels like one endless Saturday. This is because all the kids are home all day, just like they are on Saturdays. So I float anchorless through the week, continually surprised to discover that today is in fact Friday (Or Tuesday, or Thursday). Sundays are anchored by church, everything else floats.

Despite the drifting nature of the week, I am still getting lots of work done. This is good and necessary. Every day brings us closer to book shipping, GenCon, and AussieCon. Each of these events has piles of necessary associated tasks. I’m working my way through the lists, keeping careful notes to make sure nothing gets forgotten. Of course things do get missed, but I try to make sure they are small things.

My focus on all things merchandise and convention has crowded writing out for now. This will change, but at the moment it is necessary. Writing in the summer is always hard because I have so few empty spaces in which to contemplate. All the spaces are filled with children. These children are all loving the relaxed schedule of summer. They are adapting admirably to the lists of chores on the wall, and the house is getting incrementally cleaner every day. This makes us all glad. Yes, the kids are glad too. They like having clean places to play.

June is a month which will mostly be spent at home. This is good. We need time to stabilize. Howard needs time to build up the buffer. Because at the end of the month the books will arrive.

Observations on June 3rd

By / June 3, 2010

At 11:30 last night I was falling asleep on my feet, but I did not want to go to bed because the house was so quiet. I was in need of quiet. So I lay on the couch and dozed off while Howard played Oblivion. He woke me at 12:30 so I could go to bed. I shambled up stairs, changed into pajamas, collapsed into bed, where I found myself awake and fretful. I realized that the QFT preliminary layout was looming in my mind and making everything else feel impossible. So I got out of bed and spent the next 3.5 hours getting it done. Birds were chirping when I went back to bed.

I am very tired today, but I can tell that it was the right decision. I had a solid block of time to concentrate that was completely un-interrupted. There are still QFT tasks to do, but I’ve been able to hand off materials to two people who were waiting on me. That feels really good. Now I need to be at least moderately effective today, until I can crash at bedtime.

***

Yesterday Link moped around all day and I nagged at him constantly to get his chores done. He finally did at 6 pm. Today Link was up, dressed, smiling, with all his chores done by 10:30 am. The difference? He took his medicine today after being off for a few days. Having the chores done is nice, but the I-can-handle-anything smile is why I know that the hassle of medication is worth it. Medicine does not change who he is. He is himself, he feels like himself, he is just able to plan ahead and accomplish the things he wants to do.

***

I have magnets. They are sorted and bagged. I have ordered shirts. They will be in early next week. Prints will be done tomorrow. Slowly but surely I am gathering the necessary merchandise pieces to fill all of these orders. Next week there will be invoice sorting.

***

Some days the kids are nice to each other. I like it when that happens.

***

I am very tired.

RMS Pre-order day

By / May 25, 2010

The nice thing about having a week packed with important things is that if I start fretting about one I can distract myself with another. Pre-order days always turn me into a scattered mess. The first few hours in particular are like the first few steps onto a stage. You’ve practiced your lines, the set pieces are there, the lights are filling your view, but until the audience laughs at the first joke, you just can’t be sure it is all going to work together or just be an expensive mess. Apparently pre-order days also inspire run-on sentences. So at 10 am Howard and I were both terrified. The orders were coming in, but all the pent up anxiety over the success of the book and our business, threatened to overwhelm us. So we stood in the kitchen and talked of anything but business.

I think Howard did a better job of keeping his day on track than I did. I frittered away the day on distracting activities. By afternoon the fear subsided and we were able to function almost normally. Tomorrow I have to get back to work. Too many things for me to do.

The pre-orders are going well. We’ve sold over a third of the sketched editions. This is excellent for the first 12 hours. I hope this trend continues.

Some weeks are not normal

By / May 24, 2010

This weekend is CONduit and Balticon. In a normal week having Howard and I attend two separate conventions at opposite ends of the country would absorb all our extra energy for the week. Planning and packing would be the focus for the week.

However this week is also the last week of school. This is a bigger thing than any convention. There are end-of-school things to be done and summer preparations to be made. Normally I would spend the entire last week of school attending year-end events and planning the summer schedule in detail.

But this week is also crunch time on Quest for the Tavern layout. I really should have had it done last week. So every spare minute should be spent in my office hammering away at that project.

Only tomorrow is the day we open pre-orders on Resident Mad Scientist. Since pre-order is our biggest sales day of the year, and the core of our financial stability, it trumps everything else. So instead of all that other stuff, I spent all of today entering new items into the store and tweaking other merchandise entries. We have new prints, new stickers, magnets reordered, and re-prints on t shirts. This is in addition to the miniatures, Writing Excuses CDs, pins, prints, and books that were already in the store. We’ve poked and prodded and stressed all day until things are as ready as they can be.

Tomorrow will be a day of nail biting. Pre-order days always are. Only I can’t bite my nails because I need them to look reasonably nice for CONduit this weekend.

My Head is too full of things

By / May 21, 2010

I have fragments of half a dozen blog entries pinging around inside my brain. They are the result of my life being pretty eventful right now. I would love to give each of them the space that they deserve, but mostly I just need to clear my head so that I can survive the next week. So I offer up fragmentary blog entries in no particular order.

There is a beautiful post in which I describe taking Gleek to the local temple grounds. We went with the activity days group a couple of days ago, but the experience was a frustrating one for Gleek. She wanted to sit by herself and absorb the spirit of the place. Instead she had to bend her wishes to the needs of the group. I promised to bring her back on a day when she could be alone. Today was not ideal, but she needed it and so we went. We sat quietly. Gleek made rings and crowns out of grass blades. Birds chirped and flew nearby. It was the essence of peacefulness. Gleek was calm and happy. We could both use more of that. We’ll go back again. And I want to make the words reflect the beauty of the experience, but it is all fragmentary in my head.

I am now the owner of a cash register, which was not something I expected to ever be. This is merely one in a long line of things that I never expected to be, but ended up doing while in pursuit of something else. I haven’t opened the box yet. I haven’t had time. This is a sad commentary on how busy I am that I have a cash register and I haven’t even played with it yet. Instead I’ve been looking at the box and remembering fondly the toy cash register of my youth. I wonder if this one rings a bell when the drawer opens. Probably not. Sigh.

One week left in the school year. I’m glad. I’m ready to be done with this year. I’m ready to ditch homework and getting up at 6:30 am. I’m not even dreading the lack of quiet space in the house. I’m also looking forward to knowing for sure about class placements for next year. Mostly I just want to be able to ignore all the school stuff for a few months. (This post is just a repeat of things I’ve already said, so it’s probably best that it doesn’t get to sprawl out by itself.)

I’ve begun working on layout for Quest for the Tavern, which is an adventure module in the XDM system. Once again the text is delightful. Remembering how to work with a text heavy book did not take me as long as I feared. It is coming along nicely, but there is lots of work left to do. I’m hoping to have the first pass on layout done by the end of the weekend. This will give us a page count so we can decide what to add and eliminate.

CONduit is next weekend. I’ve got two panels, a reading, and a signing. Most of it is scheduled for Saturday. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone. I’m particularly excited about my reading. I’ll mostly be reading essays, but I may do a short story as well. Hopefully I won’t be reading to an empty room. Howard will be on the other side of the country attending Balticon.

I’m really longing for unscheduled time. I have so many things to do that it all fills up. We have a vacation scheduled in Mid June and a another Mid July. Hopefully I can find some more calm in my daily life once we’ve finished out school and opened pre-orders.

Pre-orders open next Tuesday. That’s another thing I am simultaneously feeling unprepared for and anticipating.

Things I learned while prepping for an Art Show

By / May 15, 2010

Preparing eight panels for an art show is at least 40 hours of work. Attempting to cram it into two days means it will spill into a third day and there will be fast food for at least three meals.

During the process I alternate between loving what I am putting together and worrying about whether it is good enough. In the end I am so tired I no longer care either way.

Double sided tape is my new best friend. I especially like type which comes in an industrial sized spool suitable for large projects. I also like artist’s tape. Binder’s tape, which would have been useful, is apparently a specialty item and not available locally.

I need to think twice when I utter the words “I can fix it,” because this is how I find myself hand coloring tape with a sharpie marker to bind the edges of posters whose floppiness I attempted to solve by attaching them to foam core board, only I accidentally cut the boards too small and if I don’t bind the edges there will be tearing. I colored the tape because it was white, and black looked better. Yes I considered electrical tape, but it has the wrong texture and adhesive qualities. Next time I’ll eat the cost of the floppy posters and just pay Alphagraphics to print on something hard.

I am really glad Howard built that 4×6 gaming table. It is exactly the size of the art panels and was very helpful in getting things arranged.

When faced with a room where Mom has filled the table and all other available flat surfaces including several chairs and a couple of large cardboard boxes, the logical thing for a small child to do is build a fort. Forts are especially cool when you can use pieces of cardboard and foam core board that Mom is not using at exactly this moment.

Kids are drawn to big projects and will beg to help. This is particularly true if they think they might get paid for helping. Which they usually do when they help with business work. The help of kids makes the process of preparing items for the print shop go much more quickly.

I don’t know that we will ever have the chance to put together an art show this large again. But if we do, I am now prepared. I’ve got copies of all the panel layouts and lists of what I did.

It is useful to be a collector of shipping supplies. Several times I had exactly the sorts of poster board, plastic bags, pieces of cardboard, colored paper, and large envelopes that I needed.

No matter how complete I think my list is, I will come home and discover I need something else from the store.

We should be stocking small format color prints in the Schlock Mercenary store. They look good and I bet lots of people would love to have them.

It will be interesting to see how much of the art comes back to us. I tried to price things so that they would sell. I certainly hope some of the print shop stuff will. We have things there for as low as $2.

Preparing for an art show

By / May 13, 2010

Kids are better. Yay antibiotics.

In other news, I spent all day mounting and matting artwork. It is all headed for the Balticon art show. Lots of it is for sale and so hopefully that won’t be coming back to us. The stuff which talks about our process with illustrative examples will be coming back. That is a good thing. I will carefully store it all so that we can re-use it for other convention appearances. The mounting required two trips to the store for supplies. Tomorrow I’ll go in quest of binders tape to secure the edges of the poster-sized book covers.

The next step is to lay all of the art out so that I can construct useful/attractive panels from it. I’ll have to create the informational text and print it out at the right sizes. I’ll have to document each panel as I go, because it is all going in a box to be shipped. On the other end someone will have to decipher my documentation and hang everything.

This whole process has actually been kind of fun. I got to play with tape. The finished pieces make a satisfying pile. Even better, I can stop worrying about it. One huge thing I can check off the list.

Steaks, boxes, and layouts

By / May 10, 2010

We had steak for dinner tonight and I blame the Mythbusters. We’ve been watching episodes and last Friday we saw one in which the Mythbuster crew attempted to determine if explosives were an effective method of tenderizing a steak. This fixed in the minds of my kids the idea that steak is awesome. Patch in particular requested to eat it. So today Howard indulged everyone’s curiosity and cooked some amazing tenderloin. Verdict: The kids like steak and our grocery budget is doomed.

In unrelated news, I cleaned out my shipping/storage room today. By the time I was done I had a stack of almost 20 boxes which had been laying around empty and taking up space. This happens when I pull the last books from a box and toss the empty box out of the way so I can open the next box. In theory I then grab the empty box and flatten it. But more often than not, the empty boxes get shoved from one spot to another as I’m trying to get at the stuff I really need. But all is orderly now. I have made lovely empty spaces in which I can clearly see exactly how much inventory I have. Answer: Not enough. I’ve got to make a run to the storage unit tomorrow because we need to build some more box sets. There will be shrink wrapping.

Tomorrow will also bring a trip to pick up the prints I had made for the Balticon art show. Later this week I’ll be matting things and then taping up a section of my floor to plan how to lay out the art panels.

Speaking of lay out, if you’ve ever wondered what all this “layout work” that I talk about actually looks like, you can go take a look at the flickr set I put together. As I made changes to RMS, I took snapshots of how the changes affected particular page spreads. You can look through the set slowly and read the descriptions. I almost find it more interesting to flip through quickly and watch things shift around fast. The set is here.