Midwasteland: The Sequel Influenced By You?

For those that are or have read Midwasteland, I have two questions for you:

1. Did you like the book? Enough to care about the characters? The settings? What happens next? What happened before?

2. Can you write?

Here's what I'm thinking. I'd like to take submissions of short stories from all of you based on the Midwasteland universe. I'll compile them, editing only for grammar/syntax and to make the canon, get your final approval on the edits, and then put them together for a Midwasteland Collection eBook to be free to anyone and everyone. Perhaps (after Midwasteland becomes a best seller and gets turned into Spielburgh's latest box office smash) it will make sense to release it as a hard copy book for sale, at which point you all will be the authors and I'll just be the editor. That way, we can all share in some tasty income together while getting our collective names out there as writers and showing others what we can do.

Here's the the best part. I'm almost certainly going to write a sequel to Midwasteland, so long as anyone is interested in it enough to want one. I'd like to incorporate all of your stories into my writing. I'll have to take into account the new canon in the sequel. The backstories, the future happenings, the way you've evolved the universe. In fact, if anyone out there is a fast reader and wants to give this a go, I'll post it as a guest post on this site, so we can all see how it's done.

Thoughts?

Midwasteland Kickstarter Project Released!

Here it is! Please check out the link or the embedded HTML (assuming it works!). If you have any questions or feedback, please post in the comments section. Otherwise, let's make this work!

Midwasteland: The Kickstarter Experimet

I'm not sure how well known Kickstarter is, but readers of this site and my work will soon become very familiar with it. As I've been hinting, I'm going to try to publish Midwasteland, a post-apocalyptic novel set in the Chicago-land area, through Kickstarter. Basically the way it works is I set a goal (in this case $5000), and then offer a series of tiers with different rewards based on the amount of funding each person or entity pledges. Once the goal is reached, so is the project and people receive their rewards. If the goal is never reached, no money changes hands. It's an all or nothing way to connect with my fans AND give them reasons to buy. So...what are going to be the rewards for my book? Here they are:

-$5 pledge: a copy of the eBook

-$10 pledge: the above plus a signed copy of the paperback book

-$50 pledge: the above plus a DVD to accompany the signed book. This DVD will provide a hosted tour of the settings of the book as they are in real life Chicago and the surrounding area. It will also include an interview with the author detailing his creative intentions with this novel and a brief bit about his life.

-$250 pledge: the above plus the author will also agree to write one short story (between 10 and 15 full computer pages) on a topic, character, or setting of the funder's choosing. These can make for unique gifts or corporate media.

-$500 pledge: the above plus I will agree to name a non-major character after the funder or his friends/family upon release of the book. Please note that this is for real names only (no requests to name a character Wanker McSillypants).

-$1000 pledge: This is the corporate tier. For this, a donating company will get all of the above plus, as I have peppered the settings of the book with ruins and/or remains of generic businesses, I will replace those generic businesses with mentions of real world companies (a presence or planned presence in the Chicago-land area is required to be considered). This is a wonderful way to have your business woven into an original storyline (non-intrusive to the story of course) and to have it mentioned for promotional and posterity's sake!


I plan on launching this project on the Kickstarter website this coming Monday, the 16th, barring any unforseeable delays. I will need some help spreading the word, so please, if you like my work, please pass along links or post status updates on your social media pages once it goes live! I love writing and I do it as much for all of you as I do for myself.

And if you have any thoughts, criticism, or compliments, please feel free to post them in the comments!