Kickstart My Art

Hey everyone! Until a few days ago, I'd never heard of Kickstarter. Then a few of my friends started talking about it and convinced me to give it a go. It's a site designed to help creative people keep being creative. You design a project, then seek "backers" for that project - folks who donate to keep the spark going. Right now, I'm working on a complete overhaul of a book I wrote called I'm On Fire. I wrote the book in 1999 and it needs serious fixes. I'm about halfway through the editing process, but it takes a lot of time and resources.

Full disclosure: I have a publisher for I'm On Fire - the same publisher that's doing my poetry collection Surf's Up and my short story collection This Terrestrial Hell - but though I've gotten advances for my nonfiction work, I'm not getting them for this fiction stuff. The collections and this novel will be published on ebook, at least at first, and the cool thing is, I will be splitting the profits with the publisher. It's a more lucrative back-end deal if enough people buy my books, but even that's an iffy proposition right now. I've had a semi-popular blog in the past and now the internet knows me for my Disney writing, but mostly it's all Stephen King, all the time. It's not that I have a problem being known for my King or Disney writing - hell, in this business, it's good to be known at all - but since the beginning I've considered myself a fiction writer, first and foremost. I've been a novelist for thirteen years, and now finally there's a light at the end of the tunnel. It feels awesome.

Even more full disclosure: I work four jobs. Some of them pay more immediately than others. (One of them doesn't pay at all; you do it for the art, Kev, you do it for the art). Sometimes it comes down to a choice between blocking out three or four hours to write or taking a bar shift because I might make tips. Don't get me wrong. I love working the bar and the box office; I love producing; I even love my temp job, which takes up most of my waking hours. But all these things break the momentum of writing, which isn't my job so much as my calling. I live to write.

I put I'm On Fire up as a Kickstarter project to essentially give me the time and tools to finish making this book the best book it can be. Part of it is breathing room, so that I can decline a shift in order to get another chapter out. Part of it is equipment: I need new hardware and software for my writing. This project will grant me these two factors that will allow me to turn in I'm On Fire this summer, before my next big (Stephen King) project launches.

If you'd like to back me, you can do that right on the Kickstarter site. There are incentives for backers: if you pledge $30, you get an ebook copy of my novel for free. If you pledge $60, you get ALL my fiction ebooks - the novel, plus This Terrestrial Hell and my two poetry collections, Foggy at Night In the City and Surf's Up. If you pledge $100, you get all my published writing - all the fiction and all the chapter-books on King - as ebooks. I currently have made 8% of my goal of $950 for this project, and there are still 10 days left to pledge.

Below is the link. Thanks to everyone for considering this and thinking of me. You guys rock.