PERSISTENCE
I'm doing something that, right from when I first decided to start writing professionally, I swore I would never do. I'd seen what great things could come from launching a fundraising campaign but, whether it was through sheer ignorance or dumb pride, I didn't want a bar of it because I, naively, saw it as begging. Something happened this year that made me change my stance. The first was poverty. I've skirted around it before, even come close to bankruptcy, but I didn't actually hit bottom until about six months ago, when I found myself unemployed (again), and on the receiving end of a constant torrent of final notices. (Seriously, I have enough gaily coloured letters to keep a kindergarten in craft paper for a year). I've gotten my head above water now, thanks to payment plans and the help of friends and family (you know who you are and how much I love and appreciate you all), and am starting a new job in a week, but the experience scared me enough to finally start appreciating the value of money and to not take for granted that it will always be there. It also gave me perspective on why artists/creators/business people start fundraising campaigns.
Fundraising isn't begging. People don't do it so that they can sit on their arses and play Candy Crush while donations pour in. These people have real jobs that pay for their rent, school fees, utilities and grocery bills. In a nutshell, they have to shell out just like the rest of us and, because these things naturally take precidence over everything else, their passion projects would never go ahead without companies like Kickstarter or PubSlush or GoGetFunding. As romantic an idea as the starving artist is, it just isn't realistic anymore. The sixties are over. No one can afford to quit their day job, live in a squat apartment, and eat nothing but beans. For starters, said squat apartment would probably go for four hundred bucks a week here in Melbourne, especially if it's near a major freeway (remember the days when that was a turn-off?). Speaking of reality checks, my meager earnings are never going to pay for the production costs of the typographically, linguistically, structurally epic novel I've written, (see bonkers video trailer on campaign page...plug, plug, pluggety-plug), so in order to get if off the ground, I have chomped down on the metal thing that comes out of a gun and launched my own campaign with GoGetFunding.
From Homer's Odyssey, to Alice In Wonderland, to A Clockwork Orange, to the so-addictive-I-didn't-do-my-housework-for-a-week Danielewski epic House Of Leaves, I'm a big fan of stylistically ambitious novels, so long as the actual story running through them is as readable and engaging as was the case with the aforementioned masterpieces, and so last week, when a story idea so enticingly weird and deliciously twisted came to me, I knew there was only one way to present it. It is the story of a woman who moves from one task to the next in a state of absolute oblivion. She goes to each room of her house with the intention of finding an object or achieving a goal, only to forget the purpose of each mission when she finds herself about to fulfill it, and embark upon a new one. The only things she does know for sure are that she has a house mate named Bubby, and that she was supposed to do something really, really important. She also happens to be experiencing everything in reverse order, and so will my readers. It's creepy, it's fun, it's dark, it's dead pan, and I can't wait to bring it to you. My campaign page can be found here: http://gogetfunding.com/help-me-publish-a-back-to-front-novel
