The Future Looks Good

COMPANY PRESIDENT STEVE COLE WRITES: I'm excited about the future of the company and product lines. Vanessa's little whipcracking routine has given me a new focus. I start each week with a "quota" of pages of future products to do, and do that first, then spend the rest of the week on other worthwhile things. With a chunk of each week (usually about three days) taken up by the quota, the worthless and worth-even-less projects that consumed chunks of time just do not get done. with only a few "unscheduled" days each week, I have to carefully pick the most important items on my "to do" list and no longer have the luxury of working on trivial stuff that sounds fun but actually produces little that anyone wants. I am a river to my people, and it's about time we stopped letting half of each week's water disappear into side-streams and then try to finish a new product in two weeks of 20-hour days.

Captain's Log #35 is five months away but we already have more of it done now than we did a month before CL#34 went to press. Getting a good fiction story is always the most important part and while I don't have one yet, I have a couple of people working on stories that may work out and I have one of my own that looks like it could come together. I'd be thrilled to have five stories finished right now and be able to schedule them for the next three issues.

We're all excited about the new Fed Commander releases. I'm getting jazzed about the new RPG books. And there is a ton of buzz about which four (out of ten) potential SFB products will be selected for development.

For the first time, the Christmas holidays hold out a hope of joy. (I always get depressed at Christmas.) That joy is that Vanessa and Jolene don't have classes so I can work them as hard as I want getting a jump on next year's tasks.