Hi, y'all!

Welcome to the first scheduled update of 2014. It's been a busy month, not only in book writing terms, but in many other things too!

First, a progress report on the book. Writing has continued as fast as I can manage, and I'm proud to say that I broke the 80,000 mark today! That's just the main book - historical info, details on the Feds, Imperials and a bit of Alliance is under the belt and ready for editing, and I'm badgering people for their short fiction subscriptions and providing feedback and tips. Things are going well on all of this, but I am very well aware that I should have been at this stage about four months ago. Am I going to meet my self-imposed first draft deadline of the end of January? No. Sadly not. Hopefully it'll come together through February, but I can definitely assure you all that EVERY DAY brings some new content. I would just ask you to be patient. 

In addition I'm excited to announce that the book now has its first Official Artist! He's a familiar guy to some of you, since he's also illustrating the Tales From The Frontier Anthology: a warm welcome to the hugely talented Arto Heikkinen (please, God, let me spell it properly for once!) to the Elite Encounters project. Arto's work will be visible in a multitude of places throughout the book, and I'm really excited to have him on board with the book.

I've also written a couple of short fiction pieces myself to put in the book if they make the cut with Frontier. 

Dice Rings

You're into your mast 24 hours for ordering dice rings. Now that the official total of orders is WAY past 50, if you still haven't ordered then please do - you will DEFINITELY get a ring. I'll be closing the purchase page on the Daftworks website at around Midnight on the 31st January (that's midnight GMT for anyone not in the UK).

"What then?" I hear you all asking

Once the Daftworks orders are closed I'll spend a little time each day getting the tallies right to send the full order to CritSuccess. Once they've received the order and taken your hard-earned cash then they should let me know how long it will take to process the order. Then I'll pass that information on to you. 

When I receive the package it will then join the queue of stuff to be sent out. Now I know some of you are concerned that these "not book" parts of the project, i.e. the stuff you DIDN'T pledge for, are piling up, but please be assured that the book writing is the priority. To all I say that until the first draft has been submitted to Frontier for content approval I will NOT be putting a lot of attention into posting stuff out. It WILL be done, but it may take some time. I'm sorry it has to be that way, but I'm much more keen to get this book draft finished and submitted since it's the thing EVERYONE has pledged for.

I think that's it for now. Well done again to Dan and Fantastic Publishing for their successful Audion Books Kickstarter. Congratulations to Drew for getting his final draft approved and well done to Allen Stroud for getting three quarters of the book EDITED! Thanks to all of you for your support and I hope to get another update out sooner than the end of February.

Just like British Rail, We're Getting There.

Dave