In Which The Warlock Continues the March...

I've often compared my life to that of a juggler.  I taught myself to juggle while working at an amusement park, while toiling in the long days of gift shop hell.  And, while I'm only a competent three-ball juggler, I remember my long conversations with the street entertainers during my days there, in which they spoke of greater and more impressive feats--juggling buzz-saw blades covered in lit gasoline while balancing on a tipped-up chair, or chainsaws while balancing wine glasses.

My life right now is one of carefully juggled chaos.  Between teaching, grading, taking two online professional development classes, writing and editing Cold Steel Wardens, contacting artists and layout experts, conferring with industry folks, managing and updating the Kickstarter, and publicizing for the game itself, I'm up to my eyeballs.  Each of these things spins whirls about my head, and it's all I can do to metaphorically keep tossing them back up and forging on.

Take, for example, this past weekend.  I managed to eke out a session of Hell on Earth with the PlatinumChick on Friday night, but even then, I was hard at work on my Friday update for the Kickstarter.  Saturday, amid shampooing our carpets and making curry for the annual WittLARP, I produced a series of GM screen adverts for my upcoming demo series and printed off the character sheets necessary for said demos.  Sunday was spent out at Bookery Fantasy, showing off my game in the hopes of gaining some more backers.

Only THREE?  Man, he's got it easy!

Yesterday might have been the singularity of this madness.  I arrived at my school at 7am, as usual, but downtime and breaks within the teaching day were spent editing a video update for the Kickstarter and e-mailing various contacts and potential artists.  On my prep, I took my final exam for my online history exam, which went about as well as I could have expected, given the circumstances.  Upon arriving home, I attempted to upload that video update, only to find that it exceeded YouTube's length requirement.  That meant re-editing the video to trim out about a minute of footage, then re-uploading it.  By that point, the PlatinumChick had returned home and I managed to cram down dinner and a short "de-stresssing" bath before my featured #rpgnet IRC chat.  The chat lasted nearly 3 hours, and I only managed to log off at 10:45 that evening.  My workday?  15.75 hours.  Ouch.

If you're looking at building a Kickstarter, I can't stress this enough:  don't have anything else in your life going on at the same time, if you can help it.  Minimize the level of distractions that you have overall, so that you can focus on providing quality updates and timely communication with your backers.  The less you have going, the more you can focus on your product and the publicity monster that will constantly devour your time and attention.

I'm in the "lull" right now in Kickstarter terms--that period between a project's initial surge of backers (made primarily up of a loyal base) and the end-of-project spike (primarily brought about as the project nears its deadline).  Considering that we've hit 41% this week and still have 3 weeks to go, we're doing fairly well, though our projections are very near.  Depending on the number of pledges we get in a day (some days of the lull have been great, some have been all but blank), our projections drift back and forth over our funding line.  It's easy to become absorbed in watching the numbers, but at the end of the day, playing Nostradamus helps no one and only makes a project manager more nervous.  Realism only gets you so far.

But, we still forge on!  I keep juggling my many priorities and hopefully things'll turn out in our favor, and I'll have a great game for you.

For those interested, feel free to take a look at the full transcript of my #rpgnet IRC chat.  And, if you're a Dayton local, swing by Epic Loot Comics and Games in Centerville this coming Sunday (12-16) starting at 1pm for a free demo of Cold Steel Wardens.

Oh.  I nearly forgot.  I have news.  Stay tuned on our Kickstarter page for forthcoming information!  :D