Burst of crowd funding

I’ve supported a few crowd funded initiatives lately. Why not list them all out on the blog as a signal boost? I thought to myself this morning, then ignored the small voice at the back of myself that said because so few people read this blog that you’re as much use signal boosting as a broken AM radio antenna.

Why be so negative? It’s Easter. There’s chocolate, or at least the promise of chocolate. Look, I’ll come back when I’ve got the blood sugar up to an acceptable level.

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That’s better. Now, where was I?

Night Terrace Season 2

I loved the first season of Night Terrace, an Australian radio play with a distinct Doctor Who homage vibe. More importantly, my 6 year old daughter loved it even more. We listened to the entire season in one hit while we drove from Sydney to Wollongong to Canberra and back to Sydney in one day. She often asks me if there is “more of that Eddie show”.

Well, I’m now pleased to say that more of that Eddy show is indeed in the offing. Night Terrace season 2 is now being crowd funded through Kickstarter. I may or may not have selected the option that allows you to name a character, just so my daughter can have the surprise of hearing her name included in the season. There are still a few weeks to go – get in there and throw money in their general direction. You’ll be very pleased you did.

A blurb from the Kickstarter page follows:

Scientist Anastasia Black had retired from her job saving the world, preferring the adventure of a good book and a pot of tea. Then her house unexpectedly began travelling randomly through time and space, taking with it hapless university student Eddie Jones. From the far future on other worlds to the distant past of Earth, Anastasia and Eddie have faced deadly monsters, evil corporations and a sinister disco, before finally discovering the origins of the house’s strange power.

But with no way to direct the house back home, there are even stranger adventures awaiting the tenants of “Night Terrace”: impossible spaceships, unlikely quests, ghosts of the past and the most terrible peril of all: a new housemate… 

Defying Doomsday

Regular readers might recall that I supported the crowdfunding of a book called Kaleidoscope last year, which highlighted speculative fiction stories featuring people with some kind of disability. I reviewed the book here as a part of the Australian Women Writers Reading Challenge last year.

Well, the publisher (Twelfth Planet Press) of Kaleidoscope is at it again, this time starting a Pozible campaign to fund a new book called Defying Doomsday. There is a similar premise (stories featuring protagonists with a disability), but this time the landscape is post apocalyptic.

It’s great to see a broader audience develop for books with different protagonists, and Defying Doomsday certainly seems to be continuing that trend. Going off the quality of KaleidoscopeDefying Doomsday will be of excellent quality and well worth your support. I’m also very interested in seeing how Australian editors Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench go with this project.

From the campaign page:

We love apocalypse fiction, but we rarely find characters with disability, chronic illness and other impairments in these stories. When they do appear, they usually die early on, or are secondary characters undeveloped into anything more than a burden to the protagonist. We believe that disabled characters have a far more interesting story to tell in post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction, and we want to create an anthology sharing those stories. 

Defying Doomsday

We want to create an anthology that is varied, especially among protagonists, with characters experiencing all kinds of disability from physical impairments, chronic illnesses, mental illnesses and/or neurodiverse characters. There will also be a variety of stories, including those that are fun or sad, adventurous or horrific, etc, but we are avoiding stories in which the character’s condition is the primary focus of the narrative. 

The stories in Defying Doomsday will look at periods of upheaval from new and interesting perspectives. We want to share narratives about characters with disability, characters with chronic illnesses and other impairments, surviving the apocalypse and contending with the collapse of life as they know it.

Con Man

OK, this one doesn’t need a lot of boosting from me. Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion (from the ill fated TV series Firefly – and if you don’t know what that is then you’ve missed out on a treat – and this project probably isn’t for you!) have decided to create a web based series based on a familiar premise. Fillion and Tudyk play actors who starred on a TV series Spectrum that ran for 14 episodes and was cancelled. Fillion’s character went on to acting success, while Tudyk’s character makes the rounds of science fiction conventions. Semi-auto-biographical.

The reason this campaign doesn’t need much boosting from me is that they are currently sitting on $2.6m from a starting target of $425,000. They were obviously prepared for success though, they have been revealing extra stretch goals as they go along, and those stretch goals are clearly well thought out.

Still, I love the premise and the “sample” video they have seems pretty funny. Well worth checking out.

From their website:

Wray Nerely (Alan Tudyk-Me!) was a co-star on Spectrum, a sci-fi series which was canceled -Too Soon- yet became a cult classic. Wray’s good friend, Jack Moore (Nathan Fillion) starred in the series and has gone on to become a major movie star. While Jack enjoys the life of an A-lister, Wray tours the sci-fi circuit as a guest of conventions, comic book stores, and lots of pop culture events.  The show will feature all the weird and crazy things that happen to Wray along the way to these events.

The series is a light-hearted take on the personalities, luminaries, and characters in the sci­fi community we are privileged to call ourselves members. Con Man is a way to share some of the surreal occurrences we have had, while telling the story of a guy learning to love and embrace his fans. 

I wanted to make a show that featured all of my favorite convention artists and friends together. Not only that, I wanted to celebrate the world where heroes, villains, zombie hunters, and space pirates all overlap. I especially wanted to work with my friend Nathan Fillion again.

Serial Crises: Car, Cat, and Root Canal!

And finally a crowd funded initiative that is slightly less frivolous. Kij Johnson is a speculative fiction author in the US who has had a string of bad luck. I’ve always enjoyed Johnson’s work, and while sad to see that bad things had happened, I was glad to see the power of crowd sourcing to help out. This one probably isn’t of interest unless you are familiar with Kij’s work (you might be familiar with the short story The Man Who Bridged the Mist which received a lot of acclaim a few years back), but if you are you should go and check the campaign out.

From the website:

Hello, all! I’m Kij Johnson, a writer of science fiction and fantasy. At the moment, I’m in dire straits, and I really hope you can help me. We all have horrible things happen that eat away our emotional and financial reserves; mostly I manage fine, but this last week, I finally hit the wall, so I’m asking my world for help. This is hard for me, and I feel weird doing it, but the stress of not doing it is rapidly outweighing the stress of asking. 

Here’s the troubles, all of them: My beloved Subaru Forester (it’s the blue of summer skies when you look straight up) destroyed its engine when I was on my way to a conference last weekend. I had it towed back to my mechanic. The bad news is that it needs a replacement engine, but we found a good used one with the same mileage ($4500 installed). 

So there’s that. But I was already struggling to come up with the money for two other urgent situations: my small, charming black cat (who has no official name but is generally known as The Black Cat of Ulthar; that’s her in the picture) is popping out all over her stomach with fatty tumors that need to be removed ASAP (this is probably $1200 or so) — and I need a root canal (my share is $600). Both urgent and both not happening: I’ve been stalling both for the last four months, even knowing how ill-advised this is, because I’m trying desperately to save for food, rent, and student loans over my unpaid summer — I just haven’t had the time to build any financial pad.

This all adds up to $6300, which is a lot, I know. Anything at all helps! 

I see that people don’t usually offer rewards for donations here at indiegogo life; but I’m a writer, and that’s how many of you know me. So here are some collective rewards. 

1. If we make $2000, I’ll post online for free an epic chicken poem. It’s a sequel to Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and it’s funny. To me, anyway.

2. If we make $4500 (paying for the car: I need the car to drive the cat places!), I’ll post online for free a poem or story about a car. I haven’t written this yet, so I’ll be on my game. 

3. If we make $5700 (adding the cat), I’ll give her an official name, and it will be brilliant and awesome. 

4. If we make $6300 (adding my teeth), I’ll write a story that involves cars, cats, and teeth. 

As I said, it feels very strange to be doing this, but I’m hoping that some of you will remember some story of mine you read for free online (my website is www.kijjohnson.com, but I have free fiction all sorts of places), and might consider helping out. It would mean everything to me, my cat, and my car.

 

How about you – have you supported any crowd funded projects recently? Let us know in the comments below.

Kaleidoscope edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios – review

This review forms part of my contribution to the Australian Women Writers 2014 Reading Challenge. All my 2014 AWWC reviews can be found here.



Kaleidoscope

OK, I’m cheating a little bit here. I’ve decided to review a collection of short stories that are not all by Australian women for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014. Indeed, they are mostly not by Australian women. But wait, before you throw your monitor at the wall in disgust and walk out I have reasons.

  1. It is from an Australian small press that is run by a woman (Alisa Krasnostein).
  2. It has stories by three Australian women (Tansy Rayner Roberts, Faith Mudge, Holly Kench) and one New Zealander (Karen Healy), which is almost Australian.
  3. One of the editors is an Australian woman. OK, it’s the same woman as in 1. above, but in a completely different role. Editor versus publisher. Come on, it still counts as a third reason.

So, if you’re still not buying what I’m selling, then you should stop reading the review here. But you’ll be sooorrrryyyyy!

Kaleidoscope was a crowd funded anthology that sought out YA speculative fiction that was written by a diverse range of writers and featured diverse characters (e.g. people with a disability, mental illness, suffering marginalisation because of race or religion or sexual orientation etc). However the mandate of the book was very clear – while characters needed to have a diverse background, they were not to be defined by their background. I particularly liked the requirement that characters were not to be “cured” of their diversity. Kaleidoscope is a mature treatment of the issues of diversity in the speculative fiction scene, and for that alone I’m hoping it is a sign of much more diverse fiction to come.

(As a side note, and because I’ve justified this review in part by pointing at an Australian small press run by an Australian woman, I might insert a plug here for Twelfth Planet Press. TPP has been supporting Australian women authors and championing this kind of diversity for quite a few years. Alisa Krasnostein, the owner of the press, is also one of the voices on Galactic Suburbia – a must-listen podcast for anyone interested in advancing the conversation on gender equity in the speculative fiction scene. If you haven’t already, go and check out their offerings, in particular the Twelve Planets series which has showcased some fantastic Australian women writers over the last few years. I’ve reviewed all the Twelve Planets books so far for the AWW challenge (including most recently Secret Lives by Rosaleen Love) – if you have even the slightest interest in understanding what is happening in the Australian speculative fiction field, you need to read these books!)

I won’t talk about all the stories, but as this is a AWW review I will briefly mention the stories by Australian women.

Cookie Cutter Superhero by Tansy Rayner Roberts opens the collection. The story is set in a world where superhero producing machines have appeared in  major centres around the world and people are selected at random to do a stint as a superhero. It tells the story of Joey, a young woman with a physical disability who has “won the lottery”. It is a funny, and not very below the surface, dig at the comic book industry, well written with Roberts’ trademark snarky style. Very nice opening to the book.

Signature by Faith Mudge was one of my favourite stories in the book, which focuses on the dangers of entering into a deal with Fate. Well written and characters that were well fleshed out, especially considering how little space there was to do it.

Holly Kench’s Every Little Thing gives a few twists on the trickiness of love spells. I enjoy Kench’s writing style, and this story was well constructed and a delight to read.

And for completeness, I will mention that I also enjoyed New Zealand’s Karen Healy story Careful Magic, which focuses on the perils of being a bastion of order in a chaotic world. Healy’s story hinted at a much bigger world, and left me with the desire to read other stories set in the same world.

There are also stories by Australian male writers Garth Nix, Dirk Flinthart and Sean Williams, as well as an array of international authors including Ken Liu, Sofia Samata, Jim Hines and John Chu.

As long term readers of the blog know, YA is not my favourite genre to read. I don’t mind young protagonists as such, but as I complete my transformation into a cranky old man I find myself less and less engaged by some of the themes that seem to resonate with teenagers. I also find the more restricted use of language (i.e. slightly simplified and “cleaned up”) creates more of a distance in the work. Some of the stories in Kaleidoscope suffered from this for me – the writing was excellent, but I found myself unable to “get into” the stories.

That minor (and particular to me) quibble aside, this is an excellent anthology and I commend it strongly to you. If you have ever despaired at the lack of variety in who is represented in speculative fiction, this is the book for you. If you love YA oriented speculative fiction, this is for you. Highly recommended.

I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.


Creative Commons License

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.