3 Days Left!
11 months ago
– Wed, Feb 14, 2024 at 03:18:19 PM
This one has been a RIDE! In all good ways, of course, but it has certainly surprised me. I'm glad people are so excited for this little book of mine, and I can't wait to send it out to all of you. I'll have lots more to say once the campaign finishes up, but I just wanted to give a preemptive little thank you to everyone who has pledged so far. Y'all are awesome!
Wooden bookmarks have been unlocked!!!
11 months ago
– Wed, Feb 07, 2024 at 04:29:04 PM
Wooo! So excited to have unlocked these. They're gonna look awesome.
The next stretch goal is a bit farther away, but who knows! This campaign has actually done even better than I expected, and is even ahead of where my last book campaign was at this point.
If we can reach $13,000, the special edition will come with a double sided dust jacket! We've got ten days to go, so let's see what happens!
Wooden Bookmark Reveal!
12 months ago
– Sun, Feb 04, 2024 at 11:33:02 AM
Thanks to two big pledges yesterday, we are actually way closer to unlocking this one than I thought we'd be less than 24 hours after unlocking the last stretch goal, so I had to scramble to get it designed last night. 😂 (Huge shoutout to those two big pledges! Made me all giddy when they each came through.)
So! Here's the design!
Just over $500 to go and we'll unlock a wooden bookmark for every physical tier!
I've always loved this type of design with lots of objects related to the book, and doing a bookmark made out of aspen wood for a book about a camp named Aspen Heart just felt right.
There's also gonna be a quote on the back, but I haven't decided which one yet.
Illustrated endpapers have been unlocked! Next goal: $9,000 for a wooden bookmark!
12 months ago
– Sat, Feb 03, 2024 at 01:48:50 PM
Missed them getting unlocked because I was on an unexpected adventure catching a loose puppy and taking her to a shelter, but we have indeed unlocked the illustrated endpapers for the special edition hardback! I've started the illustration, but it's still in the very early stages so I don't quite have anything to share yet, but hopefully I will soon!
For the next goal, if we reach $9,000 every physical tier will get a wooden bookmark made out of sustainably sourced aspen wood! (It's Camp Aspen Heart, so of course I had to find a place that could do aspen for the bookmarks. :D ) The design for these will be revealed soon!
What is a "hopeful apocalypse story" anyway?
12 months ago
– Sat, Feb 03, 2024 at 10:10:40 AM
I've been pushing this book as a hopeful apocalypse story, so I wanted to talk a little bit more about what that means!
We're all familiar with the usual doom and gloom we see in apocalypse stories. The world ends and everything devolves into an anarchy full of punky outfits, armored vehicles, and everyone for themselves. There's usually (but not always) a fair amount of death, gore, abuse, and fear.
These stories can be great! And exiting, and fun to read, and important in a cathartic way. Except, in real life disasters, a lot of that just doesn't happen. Studies have shown over and over that, when real disaster strikes, people tend to behave much better than the typical Hollywood disaster story would like you to believe.
That was the story I wanted to tell with Camp Daze. It is a disaster story. It is an apocalypse story. But it tires to approach those things in a more realistic way. The characters do go through hard and dangerous things. They do suffer losses. But they keep their heads and reach out to one another and just figure it out. And, in doing so, they just might realize that the apocalypse wasn't quite as apocalyptic as they first thought.
As important as the catharsis of just going wild is, I think the catharsis of seeing things go right is equally important.
Here's a quote from one of my favorite (non-fiction) books on the subject of how people behave in disasters:
“These remarkable [post-disaster] societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of a paradise is already within us as a default setting.” -A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
So yes! That's what I mean when I call Camp Daze a "hopeful apocalypse story." It's a story where things do go very, very wrong, but they also go very, very right.
