It feels like this month was about a year long.
We've had some other great Kickstarters in the past, but they didn't involve me that much. Except for signing pages, which definitely involved me quite a lot. This time, we were getting reports back from the animation, talking to Lex+Otis, developing new pledges, scheming, strategizing, and sacrificing flamingoes for The Ritual. Busy campaign! Busy and very cool! One of the things that it's hard to communicate is how much growth and development has happened over here at Hidden Gnome during this Kickstarter campaign. We've learned a lot and developed assets and relationships that will help us in the future, and if we hadn't run a Kickstarter, we wouldn't have done those things. We'd be lost and alone, weeping in the dark like usual. And now, as this Kickstarter campaign comes to a close at 5 PM Eastern tonight, it's time for THE FINAL LINKS! First, the Kickstarter is still up! Check it out here! Second, I'm streaming tonight at about 4:30 so we can watch the Kickstarter close together! That will be here. And finally, the ebook collection of Cradle: Foundation (the first three Cradle books) is still free until midnight Pacific tonight! Pick that up right here. Once again, thank you all for reading and thanks for sticking with me for so long! -Will
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It’s nearly enough to bring a tear to my eye. Eventually, every baby lion gets pushed out of the nest and has to learn to fly on its own.
One of my best friends, Lorn Hillaker, has just released his first book on Amazon! It’s about pirates and dragons fighting over gold on a magical sea, because gold is what powers their magic. If that sounds cool to you, check it out! I’ve made some references to this over the years, but I have a group of close friends that go way back, to when the planet was nothing more than a crust of molten rock. There are nine of us, each of whom secretly rules over 1/9th of the Earth. We play games together pretty much all the time*, every year we all go on a trip, and every week we select one random stranger to cast through the infinite cosmos on a journey of self-discovery. Lorn is one of those friends, and in middle school, we actually both tied for first in a writing contest. It was for a history essay, and he won because he knew the history. I won because I pretended to know the history. He went on to get his PhD in History, and I went on to make up a bunch more stuff. Now he’s muscling in on my turf. During the pandemic, while he was trapped indoors, he called me and asked for my advice in learning to write a book. I told him if he actually followed through with it, I’d shout him out. Well, he did it! Way to go, Lorn! You made it! And now your book has been thrown to the lions. The flying lions. Good luck. -Will *I tend to abandon them for months at a time while writing books. Sorry, guys. Blame Devin. This blog is basically just an update on the animation Kickstarter progress, but I didn't have a clever title for that, so I decided to abuse the W key. It has displeased me.
First of all, a huge thanks to all of you who have already backed the Kickstarter! We have about two and a half weeks left, but many of our fans have already thrown fistfuls of bills at us through their computer screens, and I can't say "thank you" enough. No matter what we end up making, I'm excited to produce some visual content. It's a new medium for me, and I won't rest until I've written for every format that exists. TV, video games, tattoos that appear on your body while you sleep, TikTok. But I have to say, this has been a BUSY couple of weeks in the tent where I live. You've seen a lot of content from me in the last couple of weeks, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. We have a bunch of stuff in production that will be coming out over the rest of the Kickstarter. Like I promised a few weeks ago, you'll be sick of me by the end of this campaign. Sick of my posts, sick of my voice, sick of finding me in your kitchen junk drawer as I steal your random paper clips. And if you haven't seen a bunch of content from me over the last week, here's most of it. We put together this YouTube playlist to contain all of our animation Kickstarter videos, so I could share only this one link and not pepper you with fifteen of them. Thanks for sticking with me, everybody! Talk to you again soon. From the inside of your dreams, where I'm trapped. -Will A lot has happened in the last few weeks, from releasing The Engineer to announcing a new Kickstarter for a Cradle animation. It's a busy time for us here at Hidden Gnome, especially as I continue to work on The Knight.
But while this may seem sudden to you, it's been a long time coming for us. A little over two years ago, we got an email from a Hollywood agent saying that his client was potentially interested in animating the Cradle series. In itself, that's not so unusual; we regularly get emails from people wanting our rights, or pretending to be influential experts, or trying to trick me into opening the secret gateway to the Underworld I keep in my basement. This one caught our attention because he said he represented Jay Oliva, and I recognized Jay's name. I watch a lot of animation, which includes a lot of superhero cartoons, and Jay has directed a lot of my favorites. I mean, a lot. I recognized his name off the top of my head, and I'm not normally someone who remembers the names of directors. Seriously, look at his IMDB page. I set up a call with him as soon as I could, and one thing stood out to me immediately: he wanted to animate Cradle. He'd read the books and he wanted to see them animated. Since then, we've been getting to know each other and working on developing some kind of animated Cradle adaptation. At first, we planned to pitch to Netflix, Amazon, or another streaming service. But as time went on, we began to ask ourselves...Why not go straight to the fans? We don't know how much we'll be able to do, because budget is a real concern with these projects, but we'll do as much as we can. And whatever we end up making, we're passionate about the story of Cradle getting told. And we'd like to see how far we can go together. -Will This very evening--in about an hour, actually--I'll be doing my usual pre-release YouTube livestream for the release of The Last Horizon, Book 2: The Engineer.
Check it out right here, at 6 PM Eastern tonight, December 3rd! That's about an hour from now! Tonight, I plan to discuss the writing process for this series, The Captain, my plans for The Last Horizon series, your questions, the true meaning of Christmas, and the location of the antidote to the potion that crawls through your veins even now, transforming your every cell. When The Captain came out a few months ago, I couldn't say too much about my writing process for it because you hadn't read the book. I would have sounded like a raving lunatic. Now that you have read the book (or don't mind spoilers and want to check in to see if this series is for you), I can rave like a lunatic about the story and you might understand me! While there's some back-and-forth with the comments, so I can't guarantee exactly what we'll cover, I plan to talk about my general development deciding to write The Last Horizon, developing the series, and then writing The Captain and The Engineer. Especially because, as many of you know, I started writing The Captain before Dreadgod but finished it just before Waybound. That was an interesting experience, and I'd like to share. If that sounds interesting, pop on in before the potion reaches full strength! You'll need that antidote before the transformation is complete. -Will |
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December 2023
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