From what I was told last evening my surgery went well and quite to my surprise I am, in fact, happy my arm is in a sling.
https://instagram.com/p/0bQpYmJvDw/
more “It’s the day after my surgery, and my left hand is still attached”
As I alluded to in Saturday’s post, I have some surgery in my future. Today I got confirmation that I’ll be going under the knife a week from tomorrow. more “Measure twice, cut once… again”
Before the year closes out I wanted to share something that I’d been working on since I haven’t published anything new this year. As I said earlier today (and in the past), I wrote a new scene for He’s With the Band earlier this year but I haven’t been able to get it all typed up. As a thank you to everyone who’s been waiting patiently for it I wanted to share what I have of the new scene available. It’s a very early draft so not only do I have more to add to it I may also make some pretty big changes to it when I finally get the new version published.
As I said yesterday, I just read Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking and I’m blown away by how open she is about everything. As 2014 comes to a close I know it seems this writer hasn’t written much and in the spirit of Amanda’s begin open with her fans I wanted to try to explain why you haven’t seen much writerly output from me, and how I hope to change that in 2015.
FAIR WARNING: I may drift into TMI territory at times. If I do feel free to skip to the next paragraph. I’ll try to keep the oversharing to a minimum. more “About the crazy, creative person in known as me”
Unfortunately the Kickstarter project simply didn’t get the backing it needed and I’ve closed it early. This obviously means the Franklin Park ebook won’t get made at this point, but since the laptop to replace my old one was part of the budget for that project it means that it will continue being difficult for me to do much writing. I still have the rewrite of He’s With the Band that I want to finish but it will take time during the day that gets taken from other tasks to work on it.
Thanks to everyone who backed me and got the word out, especially Amy, Tara and Danielle, as well as Pareesa and everyone over at the Franklin Park Coalition. Perhaps we can try it again at some point because I’d love to get this book made.
As I write this there are only nine days left in my Kickstarter project to create a photobook of Franklin Park but we’re still sitting at only 4% of the needed $2,900 raised. That’s puzzling because I’ve talked to a lot of people around Boston and I’ve heard a lot of excitement about the book, and with the exception of my very last backer all the money has come from out-of-state family members. The one Boston backer is a friend who used to live in Jamaica Plain and still raves about the area.
If you’re planning on backing my project I need to ask you to do it this weekend. After running the numbers I’ve decided to set a challenge for my backers and prospective backers: I need to raise $1,200 for the project by noon Eastern Time on Monday, 4 August. That’s just over 40%, and I it’s a lot of scratch to raise in a mere four days. But if we can’t meet that goal there’s no way we’ll raise 96% in the remaining seven days.
If we can hit that goal we’ll still need to raise about $250 every day for the remaining week of the campaign. Some will say it’s too much to raise after raising less than that in the past three weeks but if we can hit Monday’s goal I know we can all get the word out and put the project over the top.
If it turns out that Monday’s goal is missed I’ll cancel the funding and thank everyone for their help. Depending on how much money is raised by noon on Monday I”ll look into possibly trying again, either with a smaller goal or possibly through another crowd funding site. I’ve seen recently that there’s another service that can let you choose to accept whatever money gets raised rather than being all or nothing like Kickstarter does but if I don’t see the possibility of at least replacing the laptop that died back in September I’m not sure if it will make sense to try again.
If the laptop can get replaced I’ll at least be able to finish the rewrite of He’s With the Band that I’ve been trying to do for the past few months, and it should let me get back the mystery I was working on when the laptop crashed one last time and took the hard drive with it. I may not be able to make the photobook at that point but at least I can get back to writing and try to give my readers something to read. I can’t tell you how many people have told me they loved He’s With the Band and want me to write more, even if it’s not a continuation of Al’s story. Without a laptop there’s just not enough hours in the day to do the things I need to do online and to be able to write.
The ball’s in your court. If you’ve been thinking of backing my next book now’s the time. It doesn’t have to be a big amount, even small pledges can add up to make a difference, and the more people back me the more others will be wiling to join the crowd. You won’t need to pay your pledge until after the campaign ends on Sunday, 10 August, and then only if the project is fully funded. This way you can look to see what your budget will be able to handle before making your pledge.
Last week I was glad to be able to report that the Kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of my next book, a photobook of Franklin Park, had its first two backers. Unfortunately despite hearing lots of enthusiasm about the book only one other person has backed it since then. And that’s not a good thing for the creation of a photobook of Boston’s much-loved urban park. more “The Kickstarter campaign is almost at the halfway mark and it doesn’t look good for my Franklin Park photobook”
I just wanted to post a quick note to say that my ebooks are now available on Blio! It’s one of the latest stores that Smashwords has gotten my ebooks into. I’ll update the individual book pages soon but I did want to give everyone the links to each ebook on the newest store to carry my ebooks. more “Quick Hit: My ebooks are now available on Blio!”
I love looking at the stats for my ebooks every day. Even when there’s not much news I make a point to check the download numbers for He’s With the Band and the number of times the previews for Somewhere… and More and No Budget, No Pay got downloaded. It turns out that even eight months after I published WHTB I still see 200-250 downloads every month between Smashwords and their partner sites and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. more “We have a new milestone!”
As many of you know, I distribute my ebooks via Smashwords, a company that was created for the sole purpose of helping independent ebook authors get their ebooks into ebookstores so that readers can find their ebooks. As you can see from the screenshot below if you have your ebooks in the Smashwords Premium Catalog they can put your ebooks in most, if not all, the major stores where readers will look for ebooks, including libraries. more “Kobo makes it a sweep with all of the major ebookstores carrying all of my ebooks”