A Quick Update Tonight

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Tonight’s update is a bit short. I’m working out the specific sequence of events for the next section of story and doing it while racing the effects of a sleeping pill. Fun! Just wanted to bring chapter 30 to a close before we launch headlong into where things need to go next.
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Camp NaNoWriMo August - Dead Sense

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Ever since I finished my zombie story The Fast and the Dead back in February, I’ve been thinking that not only is the title no longer really appropriate but that I’d have to completely rewrite the story. This is doubly true since Camp NaNoWriMo in June, an experience that has taught me a huge amount about longer-form fiction.
So with less than two weeks remaining until Camp NaNoWriMo August, I’ve decided that my August project is going to be that rewrite. I’ll be using the first draft of TFatD as reference material, but I probably won’t have to refer to it all that much. I’ll be taking the core concepts of the story, and the characters, and fleshing both out into something much better. (At least I hope so!)
Gone will be a lot of the empty filler that I ended up writing when I didn’t know what else to write. Probably the most important thing I learned during June’s Camp NaNoWriMo was how to keep all that filler separate from the contents of the book, so with some luck, I should be able to keep it pretty tight.

A Brief Respite

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Much better! Headaches are pretty well under control, and my word count is improving. It still falls short of what I can do during a NaNoWriMo event, but ~500ish words is a lot better than 50-150, so I’ll take it.
Back to Rose, Dann, Jenny and Lydia. A brief respite before the inevitable confrontations have to occur.

Random Thoughts of Barometric Pressures

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For a long time now I’ve been looking at Kickstarter and Indiegogo and such. They’re fantastic crowd funding services that specialize in creative projects, rather like this one.

The basic idea is that creators can put together a project, a video describing their vision, a bunch of reward tiers, and a funding goal.

People like you and me then browse the projects, or hear about them on Twitter or Google+, and if you like what you see enough, you support the project by pledging money toward it.

What happens after that depends on the site. If funding is met, the project creator gets the money. If the funding isn’t met, on Kickstarter, that’s it, nothing happens. On Indiegogo, creators can do something called flexible funding, where they’ll get whatever is pledged.

There are pros and cons to each approach, but the jist of it is that it’s a fantastic means for people to raise some money to get an awesome project done.

It sounds pretty ideal for a site like this one, except that writing projects don’t really seem to have a strong appeal on these things. It’s especially tough for a digital writer like myself. I’ve never really imagined my work appearing in printed form. I’m a huge eBook proponent. I don’t actually object to the idea of printed versions, but it’s not really my plan, either.

Which means if I were to eventually go down this route, those reward tiers that I mentioned are tough to do. A lot of rewards are things like copies of the book, author signatures and so on. It’s easy enough to give out digital copies of an ebook, but all my work is already available for free, and I’ve been planning free eBook formats for a while now. So that doesn’t mean a whole lot.

It’s really difficult to sign an eBook. (Though I’ve heard there actually are projects underway to make this happen. I don’t know the details. I am really curious.) I have to imagine that wouldn’t be a great reward though, seeing as how my name isn’t worth anything yet.

This whole question of digital rewards has been on my mind for a while now, not as a focus, but as something rattling around in the back of my head. It’s an interesting problem to tackle. I still need to come up with a solution to it.

Thanks to some bad headaches (weather-induced, I think,) my mind is not in a fictional place. This means no update on The Ship of the Unforgotten today.