I love a good crowdfund. How else could I have the chance to invest in a flying bicycle, a watermelon holder, or pay a guy I'll never meet to make and enjoy his own potato salad? Nohow, that's how. And crowdfunding has given rise to Patreon, a site designed to help the creatives among to us to help fund our art.
I've been looking at Patreon for a while now. It's an interesting beast, allowing artists to publish their output and ask for funding from the marketplace at large and asking for support to help them develop. Just a quick glance will show the breadth of work on there; poetry, cartoon, music, videos, short stories, comedy, journalism... but no novels.I've been thinking about it and I believe novels aren't suited to being Patreonised. Their elongated narratives and the amount of time a reader is required to sink into one for the ultimate satisfaction of an ending doesn't exactly fit the open-ended nature of what Patreon does.So, I though, what if the nature of the narrative changed?See, here's the thing. I have a novel. I've written it. Three times now. Each time the story changes, now aspects the world are revealed, new characters introduced. If I keep this up I'm going to have a never ending story no one but me shall ever read, and I know I will never be able to move on until it's told.But what if the story was not just mine to tell? What if what I needed to be able to finish this story was help not just from my alpha readers, but the reading community as a whole?Trying to map my decision making process is an exercise in futility, but from that point I reached the conclusion that the only way I'll find piece and be able to share the story with everyone was to have everyone help in its telling. Imagine a novel length choose your own adventure story with me loosely guiding the reader. Expect the serialised novel Brood Parasites to begin on Patreon in the next month. I hope you come on this journey of discovery with me.Michael