Schlock Mercenary

Between now and October 2nd Sandra and I are both out of the office. If you’re shopping with us, your order won’t ship until October 3rd at the earliest. We’re at WXR-2018, the Writing Excuses Retreat, which sails out of Galveston and floats about the Caribbean for a bit on a great big ship which has some other people on it too.

Thanks to the generous support of our Kickstarter backers, we can now provide you with t-shirts on demand. Each design and style has been tested by us (I wore one all day yesterday) to ensure that the print-on-demand shirts meet our standards. There are four designs available right now, and as soon as our backers have received the last of their rewards, more designs will be released. On-demand printing for shirts has come a long way since the heady days of 2001 when we first tried doing Schlock Mercenary apparel that way. Like many people who have been around since the beginning, I was leery of it… based on experiences that were 17 years out of date. These POD shirts are very, very nice, and the on-demand business model means that we don’t have to worry about inventory. To my mind, the Maxim 63 shirt speaks very nicely to our partnership with on-demand printers. We might retire or update some designs as time goes on, but the thing we won’t ever do again is run out of shirts.

The Schlock Mercenary store has new stuff in it, including art prints from Keliana Tayler. Keliana recently graduated with a degree in illustration. She has been doing commissions and covers all summer, sharing studio space with me. When the time came for Keliana to set up a store front, she and Sandra realized that it would be easier for everyone involved if they leveraged the storefront that already works. Two weeks ago Keliana joined me at WorldCon in San Jose. On several occasions people looked at her work and suggested some sort of genetic connection to the arts. Speaking as one half of the parenting team that fostered, enabled, and helped to fund her development as an artist, I emphatically assured everyone that her mad skills were not genetic. She was not born an artist. She decided to become one. She’s already far better at this than I am. The only advantage I have is that I’m old and established and people view my mistakes as a “style.” Keliana’s section of our storefront is not her only web presence. You can find her at KelianaRTayler.com, on Tumblr, on Patreon, and on DeviantArt, where she has been a member for longer than I have.

Last week I started a blog post about how, now that my convention travel was out of the way, I would be able to get busy with other things. So busy was I, in fact, that I never actually published that post. Or wrote anything besides the title, which would more correctly read “And Now, Five Weeks of Being At Home.”

I’m in San Jose this week for the 76th annual World Science Fiction Convention. I’m not exhibiting, my schedule is light, and I’m Airbnb-ing instead of staying in the convention hotel(s), so it’s a little bit like I’m ghosting. Here’s my schedule: Saturday