A mid-year catch-up

It's already June. Lots of stuff is happening. A few things aren't. Here's the roundup.

Welp. At the time of publication our Frigid Kickstarter campaign will be roughly 38 hours from failing to meet its fundraising goal of $30,000. We assume there will not be any angels dropping $20k on us, and there won’t be a groundswell of support this late in the game. C’est la vie.

We are sanguine about it. It wasn’t the right project at the right time, and we didn’t have the support or reach we thought we would have. Perhaps we based too much of our pitch on our prior track record with The Rickety Man. Maybe we didn’t land emotionally with the story of Frigid. Some potential good lessons right there.

It was also a matter of poor timing, most of which was out of our control. We didn’t have much choice in launching when we did due to casting and location commitments. When the strike happened we would have happily delayed everything indefinitely had it not been for those factors. And unfortunately, it ended up not biting us.

This experience taught us a few things:

• Whatever happens, don’t delay your initial launch window (takes the wind out of your sails in more ways than one).

• Don’t try to crowdfund a short film during a WGA strike.

• Don’t try to crowdfund during an economic recession.

• Don’t try to crowdfund in the middle of moving to a new state.

• Don’t try to raise $30,000 for a short.

The last couple points are personal lessons, not universally applicable. $30,000 is a lot for a short, and some people might have thought, “why the heck do they need that kind of money for a short?”. Valid. We chose to set our sights on an ambitious project, and we really did expect to pour most of the money into the artists and craftspeople and actors who would have helped us create it. But noble goals aren’t the driving factor for a greenlight. If people perceive a project is overvalued, they will respond accordingly. Another valuable lesson.

We did raise over $10,000, which gives us a metric of potential fundraising goals to shoot for, should we go down that road again. We also identified a couple of solid options for backers who pledged at the producer level. Possible play for looping them in individually on other projects where we might be able to offer them even more creative input and a solo credit in exchange for fully financing a smaller, more budget-friendly project.

It’s one thing to ask friends and family to support you during the good times. It’s a lot harder to do it when times are tough and people are out of work. If I’m fully honest, my heart was not completely in this campaign for that reason. Perhaps that evidenced itself in my own campaign efforts, which could have been more robust, more consistent, more enthusiastic. On top of being largely distracted by the move, I know I didn’t “put it out there” as much as I probably should have.

It’s not that I felt exploitative or that what we were asking for was shady. Not at all! I believe in Frigid as a concept and what we wanted to accomplish with it. The money we were asking for was legitimately needed to accomplish everything we wanted to accomplish. Asking for money isn’t a bad thing. People have their own agency, so they shouldn’t be patronized, either. But it’s hard to ask someone to give us their dollars when they’re busy on the strike lines, not getting paid, worrying about their own career and future (not to mention how to pay their rent or mortgage). All in all, it has been a weird time, and our messaging never quite landed—in part, I think, due to the economic factors. So it goes.

We are now pivoting to some of those smaller ideas, playing with our options and seeing what we can make with fewer resources, smaller concepts, and that won’t require crowdfunding. It feels more in our lane, and won’t require us to expend valuable time and resources on the raising of financing. More time to be creative!

For anyone reading this newsletter who supported us on the Kickstarter through pledges and sharing of the project on your social feeds, we are deeply grateful and blessed to have you on our side. We hope we’ll be able to return your support in some way down the line.

---

I’m officially an Incubee

No, not a male sex demon.

Rewatching Silicon Valley (a sharply funny show in its day, and more prescient and satirically on-point in hindsight than maybe anyone realized) inspired the headline. I love T.J. Miller’s use of the nonsense word “incubee” to refer to the developers who live at his house—what he refers to as his tech Incubator.

Sorry for the diversion. On to the lede.

I recently was invited to apply for a spot in the Summer 2023 Story Incubator Writing Lab. I applied in the middle of moving, so was not confident the application was close to coherent, but last week I was informed I had been accepted, and the Lab kicks off this week!

I’m thrilled beyond measure to be one of five writers participating in the workshop and to continue to develop a passion project I’ve been thinking about on and off for the last two years. It’s a murder-mystery in the vein of Mare of Easttown meets Wind River, centered on the debate about the ecological effects of wolves on human populations (or is it the other way around?). Needless to say, it will add a bit (a lot) to my schedule, but it will also keep me dead focused on continuing to build up my writing craft chops on a story I care deeply about.

I’ll share more about that project when there’s something more interesting than self-praise to talk about. For now, I’m basking in the glow of other people connecting emotionally to what essentially was an outpouring of my heart regarding the subject of wolves and our relationship to them and each other.

You can find out more about the Lab here.

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

---

Lucid updates

There are literally no updates to report. That’s the business sometimes. I have a rewrite I need 3-4 hours to complete, then it’ll be one step closer to being put into a pitch for some financing.

I can’t speak less broadly than that at the moment, sorry. Suffice it to say, there is motion behind the curtain. Watch this space.

---

Given everything going on (and given the slowdown in Lucid updates) I may drop this newsletter down to twice a month instead of weekly. I don’t think I’ll be breaking anyone’s heart by doing so, and it’ll reduce the pressure on my schedule a little.

But if you have strong opinions about it (doubtful), I’d love to hear them.

Pax for now.