Kickstarter

Hey folks--

Greetings, and I hope that the holidays have been enjoyable for those of you who celebrate!

Recently, I received a suggestion from a backer:  He said that instead of guesstimating completion dates, which ends up annoying you and depressing me when we miss them, I should instead give you a snapshot of where we stand on the entire thing, so you can get an idea of the scope, and how much remains.

With that in mind, here is the current state of FAR WEST -- 100% indicates fully complete, including suggested edits from early manuscript readers, and full editing pass.   In areas which are not complete, I give detail on what remains.

Chapter 1: Foreword: 100% Completed 

Chapter 2: Introduction: 100% Completed

Chapter 3: Heroes Wrought From Iron, Villains Born of Fire - 100% Completed

Chapter 4: Legendary Deeds and Mighty Exploits - 100% Completed

Chapter 5: Iron Palms and No-Shadow Kicks - 90% (We're adding a few more example styles, some based on reader designs)

Chapter 6: Pilgrims on the Dust Road: 70% (Finishing up edits on Clans, and putting in some Design-Your-Own-Clan rules)

Chapter 7: Swords and Sixguns: 80% (Editing)

Chapter 8: Cog Science - 70% (Putting in some more sample inventions)

Chapter 9: Furious Action - 80% (Editing)

Chapter 10: A Fistful of Bastards - 50% (stats on a bunch of entries)

Chapter 11: The Far West - 100%

Chapter 12: Secret Scrolls of Kung Fu - 100%

Layout: Page template is designed, as is cover. Still need to drop in finished text and place art, as well as design character sheet, and do index once pagination is complete.

Art: Portraits: 86% (66 done, 11 to go).  Incidental: ~60% (need to do another 20 or so, as needed, during layout)

So there you go -- as you can see, there's not much more remaining, and now that I'm back in the office, FAR WEST is taking 100% of my time until it's complete and shipped.

I find it inexcusable that we're a year past my original estimated delivery, and your patience and support has been more valuable than I can ever say.   This has been a horrible year  -- involving the lesson learned that we were completely unprepared for the scale of the success of FAR WEST, which resulted in much more work spread among too few people (and that was before the gut-punch of losing a third of our team), and the stress and depression that resulted.   The rest of Adamant's business suffered as a result, which of course made things worse (sales of our other products plummeted, and our financial situation grew worse -- resulting in, you guessed it, more stress).

All I can promise you is that there's light at the end of the tunnel -- we're near to done, as you can see -- and that 2013 will be a better year for us all.  

Onward!

Gareth-Michael Skarka

Hey folks--

An update, and a question for you.

Still plugging away -- things are going way slower than I'd like (and not just on FAR WEST -- other stuff as well), which, to be completely honest, has me wrestling with some fairly severe stress and resultant depression issues (which I'm unfortunately prone to).   I don't really like talking about that stuff -- but there you go.  You guys deserve candor.   Ironically, stress and depression make things go even more slowly, which of course, only makes it worse -- so it becomes a vicious circle.  I'm doing what I can to get help for that.

One of the things I've been working on is the remaining backer portraits that I'm doing (if you want to see an example of my art, now that I've taken over art duties, check out the two images below, which come from the most recent updates on the website) -- those of you whose portraits were not done by Rick will see yours within the next week or so.

It's pretty much a guarantee at this point that final PDF and delivery to the printer will occur in December -- but thankfully, we're no longer handling production ourselves, and will instead be partnering with our regular print partners at Cubicle 7 Entertainment for help with printing the books, which gives us access to their slate of printers, offering much more flexibility with printers and schedules than we were able to have on our own. 

There has been a suggestion made on the FAR WEST forums that folks might like a bare-bones, text-only version of the game as soon as final edits are complete, while waiting for the final laid-out version.   We could deliver that as a PDF, EPUB or MOBI file.    If that's something of interest, let us know -- if enough people are interested, we'll certainly do it.

Thanks as always for your support, and your incredible patience with this process.   It really means a lot.

Gareth-Michael Skarka

19 November 2012

If you're not familiar with the term, agita is the phonetic spelling of the Southern Italian pronunciation of "acido", and specifically, an Italian-American term meaning indigestion, heartburn -- expanded to a general meaning of upset (usually stress-related, as in "You're giving me agita!").   I grew up on Long Island, in communities where my peers were either Italian-American or Irish-American, and so the term has been part of my lexicon for ages.

Things that give creators agita :

Scholastic has just published the third book in Patricia Wrede's "Frontier Magic" YA series. The title? "THE FAR WEST."

Then, a bunch of other folks have released an anthology of steampunk wuxia stories, called "SHANGHAI STEAM." With a cover featuring a legless guy in a steam-powered conveyance.

I'm not stupid enough to claim "plagiarism" or anything like that. But still -- seeing that kind of stuff stresses me out. (Especially Scholastic, which has the marketing penetration to potentially completely bury any reference to "Far West" pointing to us.)

Hey everybody--

Sorry things have been so quiet on this end.  September has been a rough month -- a lot of fires needed putting out, which pulled me away from FAR WEST for longer than any of us liked.   But that's behind us now, and I wanted to touch base.

Our print-scheduling window looks as though it will hit in November -- obviously we'll be looking to deliver the PDF before that.   

We've just sent a massive chunk of the manuscript (the setting section) out to the group that asked for the first look at the pages -- and, as a quick reminder, only about a third of you requested to be in that group, but we'd love to have more of you involved!   If you'd like to see the manuscript and offer your input, drop me a line at gms@adamantentertainment.com and I'll add you to the list. 

As always, discussion continues on the FAR WEST forum, so be sure to visit for the latest news.

Talk to you again soon,

Gareth-Michael Skarka

29 September 2012

Folks--

Just a quick "where we're at" for you today -- I'm actually laid up with a particularly insidious bout of Con Crud, which has knocked me out of commission for the better part of a week.  It's some mutant combo of Summer cold, my usual late-summer allergies and a convention bug, which has kicked my butt.

The manuscript sections continue to go out to those backers who have requested them, and we're making changes based on some suggestions -- which of course also have to be reflected in later sections, etc.

We're really pleased with how everything is turning out, and we should be able to deliver the final product to all of you in September.   Finally!

In other news -- for those of you who were not able to attend, we recorded the FAR WEST Seminar at GenCon this year, and have posted the hour-long video to the website:

http://intothefarwest.com/2012/08/31/far-west-gencon-2012-seminar/

Thanks to everyone who managed to drop in and say hello during the show (even though the Guest of Honor duties kept T.S. and I so busy that I know that we missed a couple of you).

Thanks as always for your support,

Gareth