Things to know about!

[clare_dragonfly]

wander_realtai is crowdfunding a painting, entitled "Nebula."

Disabled Poet Seeks Healthy Macbook

A very dear friend of mine needs money for medical expenses. You can read the full story at the YouCaring page, but the basics are that she has a rare and extremely painful illness. I've seen the progression of this disease on her body and it's awful. It can cause her pain just to be touched. There's an unusual medical procedure that can put her illness into remission, but her insurance won't cover it. She's had it done before and it was a complete and miraculous success for several years, until a different medical procedure was botched and caused the illness to come back. So far she's raised a decent amount of money, but not nearly enough for the procedure. Please, if you can't give, spread the word--every little bit helps!

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And on a different note, becka_sutton recently posted about Patreon. I am really intrigued by its setup and keep coming back to it. Basically, people sign up to donate a certain amount for each piece that's released--it seems to be mostly video creators and musicians, so people are paying per video or per song. (I did do a search and found some people doing written fiction, but they don't seem to be having success yet.)

I'm considering how I might make this work for me as a crowdfunding model. One of the main reasons I stopped doing Gardens of Prose was that I don't like taking a chunk of time out of my usual novel-writing schedule to write a bunch of short stories, much as I enjoy writing to prompts otherwise. (Actually, that might be the entire reason.) But I do enjoy writing a short story from time to time--or, like I did earlier this month, tossing out a bunch of them when I find myself unexpectedly between longer projects.

So I was thinking about setting up a Patreon project for my short fiction--like I said to Becka, it seems like the sort of thing that makes more sense with a somewhat irregular schedule, rather than a serial novel like Chatoyant College with predictable updates. I would post most stories to my journal like usual, and would accept requests from patrons and offer patron-only stories (as well as other benefits). Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Would you sign up to give me a dollar per short story?

I would also be interested to see other people trying this out!