Challenges are good

[wyld_dandelyon]

But they can be time consuming!  If I hadn't got sick last week, it would have been done sooner.  Oh, well, it's off to a beta reader now.

Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled writing. Which should mean I can get to more Fireborn tomorrow!

In the meantime, the purple ruffles basil is flowering.  In this picture, you see them in front of some sage, and chocolate mint in the background.

And, sadly, leaves are starting to fall from the first trees to turn, which means it's time to seriously start harvesting herbs and drying them.  And hoping that the first frost holds off for quite a while, since I've a bunch of green tomatoes, and they're SO much better if they have a chance to get ripe.

Tomorrow, I get to take my kid to a mandatory parents & kids meeting for her driver's ed class.  Am I really ready to have a kid who can drive? 

And parent-teacher conferences the next day.  At least being out of a job means I can show up before most other parents will be able to, which means less time spent in line.  A lot less time.  That, at least, is a good thing.

And of course, there's bill paying to do (I've been scheduling payments just before the start of the month; if I do it all at once I figure I'm safer than if I try to remember as they come due), and more job hunting, since there was almost nothing when I checked yesterday. 

I really wish this economy would recover, already! 

Also, I've been corresponding with people about doing panels at Chicago cons, and explaining crowdfunding to them.  Maybe I'll get to do a panel titled "What the Heck is Crowdfunding, and Why should SF Fans Care?"  If so, I'll be looking for other panelists.  And I should put together a handout--are there crowdfunded projects that aren't on the crowdfunding community's list, that any of you know about, that I should include?

 

Comments

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

So what is crowdfunding anyway?

Crowdfunding

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

The form of crowdfunding that matters most to me, at the moment anyway, is when a writer or artist gets paid for their work directly from the "crowd" rather than by having a middleman or publisher. Busking is a form of crowdfunding, though the word arose on the internet, following the introduction of the word "crowdsourcing," where you get a crowd to each provide ideas or a bit of work toward some common goal.

Another writer describes it as: Crowdfunding, inspired by crowdsourcing, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns. http://crowdfunding.pbworks.com/

That article has a whole bunch of examples; more interesting to you is probably the crowdfunding community on LJ, where the projects are, I think, all or almost all speculative fiction or related art and the like.

One of the things about crowdfunding and SF is that there's no widely accepted model for it; Elizabeth Bear and some collaborators are publishing Shadow Unit as a crowdfunded project, asking people to sponsor independent artists on their home page, and blogs about it saying that if the traditional publishing industry gets to a point where it can't pay enough to let people like her pay the bills, they want to know how to make money without the publishers.

[valdary.livejournal.com]

Got the driving kid thing to come. Resident Giant will be 17 next March and I'll just bet he'll be whinging for the money for driving lessons the minute he is old enough to be legal. He has a copy of the Highway Code so I've no intention of paying out until I'm confident he can pass the written exam and has a good idea of what to watch out for on the video alertness test. After that its usually £50 for first 4 lessons and then £20 per lesson and it usually costs about £2000 to insure a driver on their first car.