Planning for the future

This guy has joined a website called Kickstarter with this video in which he asked people, just people out there in Internet Land for funding to help him make his 2-D art into a pretty cool and interesting 3-D reality. With this and a couple of other videos and Kickstarter website, he acquired 955 donors and accumulated over $75,000 US.

Vicky has suggested that I make a similar video and get onto Kickstarter to ask people for money to fund my own long-term art-dreams. She makes videos and movies (and is going back to BC on Tuesday to go do a prestigious film internship at Banff) and her sister is a professional artist, so she knows about funding and professional stuff.

I have just been watching the stats at this blog slowly rising. I think the combination of cancer and art, as well as already having something of a public profile on LSN and living in this interesting place, has been a source of great interest to people. I spent years blogging here more or less assuming that I was writing for my little group of friends and regular commenters. And this is still pretty much how I approach it. But we've grown here from 350 a day to somewhere between 650 and 800 a day in the last few months. Not a huge leap by any means, but a lot more on a regular basis than I've ever had, and all for what is essentially still just a personal blog.

About money (no, I'm not putting the Paypal button back up; I'm fine, thanks) I was mightily impressed that the last time I made a plea. It took only a couple of weeks to accumulate enough dough to fund three return airfares, one all the way from the West Coast, as well as pay back people who had covered expenses and pay for a lot of drugs, private doctor's appointments, scans, tests and ancillary things like transport and communications. And that was just from you lot.

So I thought I would share a few ideas and see what my loyal chorus thinks. It's about the art thing and the book, and about having cancer and living in Rome and Italy.

All together, just with the 400 or so people who came here every day at the time, I think we ended up with a total close to 9000 dollars Canadian. Which seems like a hell of a lot of money to me!

As you might think I've had time to think about things, what things are important to me, what things I still hope for and hope to have a chance to do.