Just a reminder: Sketch-edition pre-orders close Friday at 8:00am Mountain (10:00am Eastern, GMT 3:00pm.) It looks like we’ll hit the 1,000 mark pretty close to then, but even if we haven’t you won’t have much time afterwards.

Here’s the sketch edition link.

Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars is now available for pre-order.

We will open worldwide pre-orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars on Tuesday, September 2nd at 8:00am Mountain Time.

The book is $25.00, plus shipping and handling. If you want a numbered, customer-choice sketch edition, it’s $35.00+s&h.

Sketch editions will be available until at least Friday morning at 8:00am, so you have three full days to order one of those. If we haven’t hit 1,000 by then, we’ll keep sketch editions available until we do.

On Friday I delivered the 2:00pm keynote at the Utah Open Source Convention (UTOSC) at Salt Lake Community College. It would have been nice to attend the whole show, but it has been a full, busy week, and this weekend is the family reunion up in Pocatello, Idaho.

So Sandra and I packed all the reunion stuff into the van, loaded the kids, and drove to SLCC. She dropped me off at 1:00pm and took the kids to lunch and to a park. I met some folks, delivered the keynote, and then jumped in the van and headed north at 2:45pm.

As long as we’re talking about threes of things, here are three comics whose links I’ve not shared before, but which I believe you’ll enjoy:

Chainsawsuit: Kris Straub hits the essence of cartooning with this new offering. Minimalistic? Yes. Funny? Oh, my.

TheaterHopper: Tom Brazelton takes on movies, and the people who watch them.

I took a chunk of the day off and did some fig-painting. The last four models in my unit of Bog Trog Ambushers got their last coat of paint.

I keep track of the point-count for painted vs unpainted models in my collection using the “Armies of Immoren” tool. Imagine my surprise when I updated the model count, and the point count climbed to exactly 3000.

For the record, 3,000 points’ worth of Warmachine and Hordes models was a lot easier to reach than 3,000 strips was. Still, it’s quite satisfying.

Just last week I was scripting and I used the phrase “revoke metaphor privileges.” It made me giggle, but it sounded familiar. I worried that maybe I was stealing from somebody.

Turns out I’m stealing from me. I decided to run the line anyway. In the linked instance above it’s the punchline. In the upcoming script (three or four weeks out, I forget) it’s the setup for a different punchline.

Heads up, everybody. Sandra and I will be opening pre-orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars next week — probably on Tuesday or Wednesday.

It’s been just over a week since we introduced an RSS feed here at Schlock Mercenary. In that time almost 1500 of you have subscribed.

So I’m minding the Blank Label Comics booth at Comic-Con, and this nice young man walks up to me with an octopus…