The coins have arrived. 

Sandra blogged about it here. She and Janci will begin shipping things tomorrow. 

I have jingled them, pocketed them, fed a key ring through one, and basically adored them, and I did all of these things when I was supposed to be drawing comics. Fortunately I then went on to draw comics.

Some of you will be getting your orders before the end of this week. I'll post another update as the shipping begins in earnest.

(Oh, there are still almost 200 of you who haven't checked out at http://schlockcoins.afterthecrowd.com. Until you do that, we don't have your shipping address. We can build your order, and we won't sell it out from under you, but we can't send it to you until we know where to send it.)

Sorry for the radio silence, folks. Very shortly after that last update I got sick, and then got sicker, and then got medicated and that made me REALLY sick. Sparing you the details, I'll just say that I'm finally off the drugs, back on my feet, and eating people-food.

During these last four weeks it's been a struggle just to keep up with the comic, and I also needed to finish the marginalia for Book 9, Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic, which went off to the printer today. Fortunately, the only thing that needed to be done on the challenge coin front recently was being done by the manufacturer. It's nice to know that the people you've hired to do a job are doing it right even though you're not watching.

I spoke with our manufacturing rep yesterday, and he said that the minting is well under way, and coming in on schedule. Thirty thousand coins will be shipping from the plant on May 20th, and should arrive here at Chez Tayler on the 22nd or the 23rd of May.

This means there's a small chance of me having coins with me at Phoenix Comic-Con (I fly late on the 22nd or early on the 23rd) but as soon as I get back on the 27th they'll be waiting for me me to dive in and help Sandra with the shipping. 

And by "help" I mean "feed my kids." My job is to keep the household in order while Sandra turns a portion of our home into a facility for shipping 3500 packages. Now that I'm healthy (and have lab results to prove it) I'm allowed to cook for the family again. 

The Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins project is on hold until we ship your merchandise. We've collected lots of great first-hand accounts of the tradition in action, but the compilation, the editing, and the back-and-forth with contributors won't begin until June. Meanwhile, I've allowed some of those accounts to inform a couple of upcoming strips (May 26th and 27th.) My goal, as stated before, is to increase awareness and understanding of the tradition, and I think you'll be pleased to see how neatly that goal meshes with the machinations and mysteries going on in the comic. I've run the story past a few active-duty friends, and they love how it works. 

Realistically, I think May 29th is the earliest that we'll be sending full sets out in the mail. If your shipping address is going to change between now and early June, please email schlockmercenary@gmail.com. Let's straighten things out BEFORE we start handing packages to nice people with trucks, uniforms, and global infrastructure. 

The coin order has been placed. 

We're making enough coins to fill all the orders, including those from a few backers who haven't yet completed the checkout process at https://schlockcoins.afterthecrowd.com, and we're also making enough coins to carry about 25% of the total order as inventory. 

The bill? $91,527.00, or just over fifty times the original funding goal. 

Sadly, there will be a delay -- we did, in fact, swamp the manufacturer. The full coin order will not arrive at Chez Tayler for another 40 days. From there it will take us at least a week to assemble bundles for shipping, and then, sometime in early June, we'll have a shipping party in which 3,000 packages go out the door, and Sandra and I rack up $30,000 in expenses for postage.

The delay means that your coins will ship in early June, not late April as previously promised. 

Ships!

The new ship coin images are attached to this message. I'm still tweaking things, including consistency in the text, positioning/alignment of some elements, and (most importantly) breaking the symmetry of colors. I want these to NOT all look the same, and right now with the teal they do.

Monkeys!

Also? NEW MONKEY. We fixed the placement of Nie and moje on the back. It was pretty easy once I admitted to myself that the original design was wrong.

Stats!

I anticipated losing about 2.5% of our total dollar amount to abandoned pledges. That number is now down to 0.31%, which is ridiculously low. When Rich Burlew got his down to 0.32% he called it "astoundingly low." Ridiculous is better than astounding, I guess.

78% of your have checked out with Pledge Manager. Many of the rest of you are rubberneckers, in for a dollar, and it's possible you're just going to let that dollar go. You have about a week to make up your mind.

During that week we'll be getting the final designs locked, and then, briefly, opening the Pledge Manager as a pre-order system so that the general public can have a shot at some coins. 

If you want to share the URL with friends -- https://schlockcoins.afterthecrowd.com/ -- you are welcome to do so. 

Ship coins are almost done...

I got a stack of ship coin proofs back today. I'm sharing them with you as-is, so you can get a feel for where we are.

These look pretty good,  but I had a LOT of changes. Here's one of the proofs after I marked it up requesting changes. 

And here's my instruction set (trimmed a bit from the word-bloat I usually send):

1) Move name together on face

2) Add Tagon's Toughs text bracketing Tagon silhouette logo, bulging into the image space.

3) Add lightning bolts

4) Add stars.

5) Move "Ennesby" and HV-6 around to make space.

6) Break the inner ring with Ennesby's, umm... knob.

7) There should now be room for the text on the back of the coin. Let it wrap.

And now you can see what I'm like as an art director! 

Note that while this was the most extensive set of changes, ALL of the designs above are being tweaked. Joey is doing bang-up work on these -- my tweaks should not be taken as critique of his work. They're more of an alignment of his supreme craftsmanship with my artistic vision. 

Man, that sounded pretentious. Time for humility, yes?

If you see a typo up there EMAIL US at schlockmercenary@gmail.com. Yes, February has 30 days in 3096, but one of you already caught (and we fixed) a typo in the February that I would have missed. 

... and you're almost done, too!

Gary tells me we just passed the three-quarters mark in the Pledge Manager, which means that as soon as I've got finalized designs and money (Amazon hasn't issued the payment yet) I can start ordering coins in the right numbers to fill all your orders.

We had kind of hoped to get this done on April 1st, but that might be pushing it a bit. Sandra and I are taking the kids out of town for Spring Break midday on the 1st, and we won't be back until the 4th or the 5th, which means that unless Amazon issues payment before the 1st, you fine folks have until the 4th to complete checking out. 

And now that I've said that, I really ought to give you folks until the fourth. That gives these designs some time to bake, and it gives us time to spitball our above-order-count inventory. Err... I mean, it gives us time to go on vacation. 

Thank you again for your patience with us! Getting these last designs right is critical, and apparently taking time off for my family is important too. 

--Howard