It's Sunday morning here in Chicago. My coffee is hot. I'm watching twitch. An otherwise normal day for me if not for the crowdfunding campaign that hit 100% while I slept. In all honesty I knew we'd hit it, but figured it'd be sometime near the end of January. The image of it being at 99% on January 31st and one saintly figure coming by and tipping it over with their purchase has been on repeat in my head since before the launch on Friday.
We're all trying to Figure Things Out in this moment and will continue to do such for the near future. Possibly for all time. No one knows what is the right path, even if they pour tons of money into marketing departments to figure that out for them. Us here in the indie scene in particular are Trying. All we can do is listen to our peers and maybe more importantly, to that feeling inside of us.
When the kickstarter news dropped in December, a month before I was going to go live with a project on their platform, I, like many others, felt upset. But I think more than that I felt like a phony. I believed that, without kickstarter, perhaps my books would be nothing to people. Perhaps I had been misguided. I worried that underneath it all, I wasn't "good" or "worth it."
We all have feelings like this when it comes to life. It's natural, I believe. And in those moments its hard to see them for what they are--the lingering edges of an imposter syndrome. It's even harder to see when you don't have hard proof to the contrary. But I did! I had my itch. My twitter. And still the thoughts and feelings took me quite hard.
Beyond those feelings though, I knew I had to stop. I knew that I could not use Kickstarter anymore.
I checked to see if Walgreens was hiring, in case I needed to get another job. Just in case. I'm not sure how many people know this, but before this career was possible, I worked in an office and before that I picked up garbage and worked in warehouses. I'm not as good of a manual labor worker anymore because the repetitive strain has messed up my shoulder (I tried to lift some weights last night and was reminded of my limits). There was a time, not long ago, when my job had convinced me my body was all I had to give to this world and that belief took a long time to shake.
Anyways. This is me trying to be glad I was wrong. This is me being glad that I can keep doing this work here, at least for a little while longer.
I feel safe announcing that all additional funding beyond the 100% mark is going to go to reprinting some stuff like .dungeon, Iron & Lies, and probably Endsville. We'll see how the rest of the month goes.
This quick funding means I can put in the order at Sheridan earlier, which means quicker books for everyone. Whenever we get to the point where I can hold a physical copy in my hands, I'll let y'all know.
Until then,
John