holy carp!

I awakened this morning to discover the short story commission has reached its minimum goal! On Friday, August 7th, I will send out “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” to all of my patrons, who will be the only people to see it until I find a market elsewhere for it or even possibly until I have enough stories for an Old Races anthology. If you were waiting to see if the story was going to be a go before becoming a patron, perhaps this is the time to act.

I’m trying to figure out if it would be…fair, for lack of a better word, to let people become patrons via direct payment to me instead of through fundable, which requires a $10 minimum. I think I’d probably still have to set it at $5 or something, because I would not want people who went through fundable to feel ripped off, but I’m kind of afraid that offering a buy-in option after the base goal is met is…well, not fair. If people, particularly those who’ve become patrons, would like to weigh in on this, I would be very interested to hear your opinions.

My friend /Bryant (who suggested this experiment) refers to this as a potential sustainable funding model. One of the peculiar things about being a writer is that there is no steady paycheck, and there’s not a great deal of direct-market paying work done on individual levels (tons of fan fiction, yes, and plenty of freebies, but less in the way of finding a market than, say, many musicians or visual artists seem to have managed). Mostly we sell books or short stories which are provided to the reader via a publisher, so this is an interesting, exciting, and somewhat terrifying thing for me to try. I would *love* to be able to do this quarterly, presumably with stories of differing lengths and therefore differing minimum commission goals.

Thank you all very, *very* much for making this work for me. You have no idea how excited I am, or how much I’m looking forward to writing this story. I’ve known since the beginning that there was some kind of story about Janx and Daisani and the Great Chicago Fire, and now I get to find out what it is!