Now that the dust is settling, I absolutely have to give you my sincere thank you letter. It's long-winded, like everything I do. Mercifully, Facebook will condense this so you don't have to read it if you don't want to. But I hope you do.
If you haven't heard, we raised enough money to release my next two books through Kickstarter, "Flip" and "Us", thanks entirely to you. You have no idea what this means to me. And I love you all.
And I keep saying that you have no idea what this means to me, and that I love you all, but you really have to understand why. So I'm going to tell you.
After I released "Them" and we raised the money to self-publish it, I felt good. There was and is still so much work to do, and so much more that I want to do, but I felt proud and felt that I was on the right track.
So, when I started my second fundraising event to make the second and final book, I thought it would be a slam-dunk. A natural progression. A next step.
And it flopped.
Hard.
I wasn't even close.
And I'm already an anxious and melancholy person, but it hit me pretty hard. This kind of stuff -- art -- is hard enough to do in groups, as a team. Alone, it's almost impossible. And having support and then losing it so quickly hurt. It honestly depressed me. Since I was a little kid with a stupid bowl cut, I've been using and misusing words with heartfelt passion and with a conviction that made me just know that this is what I wanted to do.
This is what I'm supposed to be.
So, after it failed, I didn't really know what to do. So I just stopped doing stuff and tried to figure out what to do next.
Nothing.
This part will be ironic to anyone who's read "Flip": yeah, I may have mixed feelings about religion and fate, but I do believe that things happen for a reason. And I had to fail then because something else was coming.
Still defeated, I went to bed on November 1st. Since I can remember, even as a little kid, I've always wanted to write a book about dreams but I could never break the story. I couldn't figure it out. But sometime in the middle of the night on November 2nd, I did. I broke it.
November just coincidentally happens to be National Novel Writing Month, where thousands of writers around the world try to write a whole story in just a month. So I decided to try, too.
If "Us" would have gotten the money it needed, I never would have tried this. I would have put all of my focus on it and "Flip" wouldn't exist. But, instead, it does exist.
And I thank the sky every day that it does.
It changed things. It took me out a box that I could have been packaged in. It stretched me, and it hurt me, and I wouldn't change it for anything.
And then people started saying nice things about it. People I don't know. People I know closely.
And I figured out that I wasn't ready to finish the first thing I started until I wrote this thing. And that's when the Kickstarter idea kicked in.
And now, with everyone rallying behind it and supporting it and really just kicking ass for it, it's done. The next stage can begin (and all the work's on me, so you can relax now). And it is all thanks to YOU.
Honestly. Seriously.
It is all thanks to you.
THANK YOU.
And I thank you from the bottom of a heart that I think is secretly big, but in all honesty you all probably know how big it is.
Because it's big enough for all of you nuts.
Special thanks to Kody Kile, Lora Mays and Matt Mays, Elizabeth Ferguson, Justin Schoeben and Magan Marie Schoeben, Cathy Lola Kleven, Lydia Siefken Fitzgerald, Stacy Scherer, Peter L. Vogen, Nicole Sublet, Jill Hanson, Nicole McDonald, Cat Havumaki, Poly Mendes, Blair Warnemunde, Bekah Fitz, Jackie Daugherty, Amy Kielmeyer, Krista R Baker, Wayne Zbytovsky, Eliana Hutchison and everyone else who supported me in this big, dumb dream.
Hopefully, someday, I can be the kind of person you can be proud to say, "I knew him when...!"
And if you want to donate any spare change until the last day, this Monday, February 24th, here's the address:
https://www.kickstarter.com/
- D
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