Kickstarter Update: Good News, Bad News

The short version goes like this:

The bad news is that I’m pretty sure at this point I’m scrapping the “sidekick-style storytelling” bit.  Which means that the final version of Hungry Gods won’t include a bonus short story, just the primary novel.  So what does that mean for everyone who’s contributed at a level where they’d have gotten that story ($10 and up)?

That’s the good news.  Instead of a bonus short story, you’re all going to get a bonus whole darn book of short stories.  I was already collecting up and still writing shorts to publish as an “Identity Crisis companion” and have decided that I’m going to transfer that would-be sidekick over into this collection.  And, of course, it would be morally and ethically wrong to cheat you all out of that story, so I guess I’ll just have to give you the whole collection of five stories instead. 

Now the wait on that item may take a bit longer, so I’ll still make good on providing a short story from that collection when the time comes to pay out the rest of the Kickstarter rewards.  Then I’ll just let you all know when the companion collection is published and we’ll work it out at that time.  Mostly likely, the ebook versions will be free to everyone who has it coming, with a signed paperback option at minimum cost (but still free for the $100 contributors).  

So, in a nut shell:

  -- There will no longer be a “sidekick” short story included with the novel.

  -- But you will still get a short story when the time comes.

  -- And you will get the short story collection in the not-too-distant future.

(sucking it in so hard I can't breathe...)

 

The longer version/rationale goes like this:

When I first envisioned and sat down to start writing Hungry Gods at the tail end of 2013, I thought it was going to be a 5,000 word short story.  (That’s about 20 pages.)  Wow, was I wrong!  Then, after I got the first couple of scenes done, I thought it might end up being as long as 10 or 15K words, as much as 50 or 60 pages.  Again, not an accurate estimate.  

At this time, as I am working on revising it and further developing some of the scenes and characters, the novel itself is going to be at least ten to twelve times longer than that first estimate.  I’m not done yet, so I can’t say for sure.  But I’m more of an adder than a subtractor when it comes to revisions. 

So I first came up with the “sidekick-style storytelling” as a way of fleshing out the page depth between covers.  I figured it’d be a short novel, so why not add a short story to help it out.  And then I would do the same for all three books of the Identity Crisis series.  I now realize that I don’t need that extra story to fill the book.  And as I begin to develop the next two books in my mind, I already know they’ll both be longer than this one, so no sidekick padding needed there either.  Thus, no sidekicks necessary.

Where I could use that padding, however, is in the companion short story collection.  I have four stories planned for it now, the longest one (I’m estimating again, and we know how good I am at that) being probably 10 to 12K words.  So throwing the Hungry Gods sidekick into this mix would be more beneficial than adding it to the first novel.

So there you go, all my thought processes and excuses laid bare. 

Right now I’m hoping to have the novel Hungry Gods out by the end of 2014 and the companion collection out by the middle of 2015, as well as a science fiction murder mystery novel that I wrote ten years ago and plan to revise for final publication (also by mid-2015).

The embarrassing pictures: Halloween 2010, photo-altered to look like artwork.  I figured everyone was tired of the same HG image on these posts.  But you can still click any of them and go to the Kickstarter campaign.  Go ahead, try it...