The Boy in the Castle

Survey Update!
over 7 years ago – Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 10:29:26 AM

Good Morrow, my dears, O my patient, patient friends -- 

I have just submitted my surveys to backerkit for review. (!)They'll review the content over the next couple of business days, and very soon after that you can expect to see surveys, at last, in your inboxes.

(If you're wondering -- Why has this taken so (darned) long? Anxiety. Anxiety and dyspraxia. It's a tonne of information to organise, and for no particularly good reason, besides the fact that I have that sort of brain, I've been deeply worried that I was going to screw it up. Between that and Life Events going off every few days, it's taken an absurd amount of extra time for me to confront the surveys. I apologise for the delay, and I truly appreciate your forbearance.)

A few notes about what to expect in the surveys:

• Pre-orders! If you have friends who missed the campaign, you can send them here to order a book.
• The ability to change your pledge level; customise your pledge; and order extra books and prints!
• Shipping! Shipping will be handled in the add-ons section of the surveys. (Those people who can arrange to receive their book in person are thus spared having to pay unnecessary shipping costs.) 
• Where applicable, you'll be asked to provide information about your custom collage portrait or handwritten quotation. This conversation between us can be as basic or in-depth as necessary, but it starts in the surveys!

Okay! That's about all I've got for now. Thank you again for tolerating my slothfulness...

And you'll be hearing from me again soon! Keep well out there.

-Kit

Survey Delay
over 7 years ago – Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 08:20:47 PM

Hey All, 

I got a question today about surveys, i.e. Where Are They? --so I just wanted to check in with everyone, and let you know that the surveys are still in the works on my end.

I've been working on finalising book things, and then I've had to take a few weeks' detour into Life Things that Came Up, so the surveys are taking me a little longer than anticipated to complete. However, everything is still on track and well underway! 

Hoping All's Well in everyone's Castles, 

<3 Kt

Of Things to Come
almost 8 years ago – Wed, Jul 06, 2016 at 07:53:50 PM

 Hello, Faithful friends, 

I hope that everyone who was celebrating this past holiday weekend enjoyed themselves. My long weekend extended into yesterday, when I was able to take a little road trip to acquire a new friend/investment/sweet piece of kit:

You all can consider that a hint as to my Next Big Undertaking. If you like. : )

So --  there's been an extra lot to celebrate! I'm feeling energised after seeing and hugging so many of my lovely friends these past few days, and I'm back to work, setting up the BackerKit surveys for you. These will provide:

- the ability to alter your pledge amount and tier

- a variety of options for add-ons

- AND the ability to pre-order books and other items - available to both backers and non-backers. So if you know anyone who's still wanting in on this - you can let them know they haven't missed their chances. 

It's going to take me a little bit of time to put the surveys together, but you should be seeing them within the next couple of weeks!

Meantime, folks, stay cool, and as ever, 

<3 Kit

About Depression
almost 8 years ago – Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 06:02:06 PM

Hail, Monsters & Heroes,

We're under the 48-hour mark, and over 150 backers! 

I want to thank you very much for your attention and your time, for your appreciation of this project and your confidence in me; and I'd like to ask you to please spend these last two days sharing the project with anyone you think might want to know about it.

There have been so many moments in the last month when I haven't known what to say. 

This book's mission has been to have a frank conversation about depression, without, ideally, being depressing. I think one of the things that holds us back from this conversation is how difficult it can be to watch another person suffering, and to stare down our own futile impulse to help. The experience of watching someone ride it out, knowing there's nothing much you can do, can be even more defeating than the experience of depression itself. Depression comes with an insulating layer, after all. 

So there is a conflict of expectations when I write these updates: my Actual Job, right now, is to be excited about this project, all day every day, out loud. So guess who hasn't been doing her Job? This depressed chick, right here. 

And, oh goodness, Dear Reader, I am hella depressed. I am, simultaneously, so excited, and grateful, and -- but every time I need to get to those feelings I have to dig through a peat bog of sadness and fear and The Bad Kind of nihilism. And I think that my other Job, right now, is to be saying this to you: like it's acceptable, like I'm not ashamed of it, like it's not a Terrible Thing that I'm asking you to bear just by knowing it.  

Some of you might not be following along with this train of thought, and that's cool, but some of you have Felt This Shit, and some of you have watched other people feel it, and I'm writing for you lot right now. For keeping on trying to do stuff while your brain tries to take you down from the inside. Or for keeping on believing in someone who has extra difficulty believing in themself. 

Speaking, as always, strictly from my own experience -- the shame has been by far the worst of it; the feeling that I might not actually be a real, valid person. I'm still fighting it. Depression undermines a person's self-evidence, and social stigmas confirm that feeling:

You're just too weird to exist.  

I'm grateful to be alive at a time when we're learning how to be less culturally dependent on the idea of 'base normal'; when there's a growing lexicon of ways to say "this is how I work"; a time when I was able to get some pretty good help, and medication, almost as soon as I realised I needed it. But I also know for sure that I've been very, very lucky. It doesn't go like that for everyone; I'm pretty sure the bad experiences still outnumber the good ones. There's still so much work to do. I'm proud to be even a small part of it. 

I want it to be less scary for people to admit they're having trouble with their brains. I want more kids to grow up with access to an ongoing and healthy conversation about neurodiversity. And I'd  really like for none of us to ever have to feel like we're too weird to exist. 

But meanwhile, I'm going to start digging into the post-campaign survey production, so we can get cracking on reward fulfilment as quickly as possible; get you all some books and some art! 

Keep being you, and Thanks, and Thanks again,

<3 Kt

The Story of the Books
almost 8 years ago – Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 04:30:51 PM

Hallo, friends,

As we close in on the final days of the campaign, I'd like to go into some detail about the books themselves.

Though the books don't tangibly exist yet, the Wizards and I have already done a truckload of emailing, considering, questioning, testing, and decision-making. 

Once something exists, some quirk of human brain function makes it almost self-evident; it's not until you try to create, or re-create, something, that the cavalcade of choices involved really hits home.

The first challenge, as the Wizard of Photographs writes in a recent blog post, was "how to take 80+ pages of collage and hand inked artwork complete with every smudge and erasure into a crisp, clean, print-worthy images that we could compile and send to the printer."

It's true. My working process is super smudgy, though I may wish it were otherwise. I had been scanning my work-in-progress pages, just to keep track of them, on whatever flatbed or printer-scanner combo was available to me in whatever place I had been living; but it was clear that something better was called for, to process any draft that was going to have an audience. It took me weeks to get up the nerve to start asking for help - true story -  but eventually we betook ourselves down to Our Local Print Shop, to consult with Cid, the Oracle of Printing. 

We tried a couple different scanner/printer combinations, but in the end, as it turned out, our best option was not to use a scanner at all, but to photograph the original pages. This was a fortuitous turn of events, because it meant we definitely had The Right Wizard for the Job. 

Meanwhile, I had been exchanging many, many emails back and forth with the good (and patient) people at Art Bookbindery, adjusting my plans and expectations by minute degrees with every prompt reply. I was able to look at sample prints of my page designs on several different kinds of paper.

Our ultimate aim in this project has always been to make the finished product as faithful a replication of the original as possible, and to this end i've chosen to print both hard- and soft-cover editions on the 100-LB version of a smooth, bright white paper called "Cougar". (And speaking of decisions, I just made that decision right now. Transparency!)

Both books will be approximately eight and a half inches square, and both will contain the full illustrated story and the acknowledgements section, which will take the form of a unique calligraphic artwork comprised of the names of all the Kickstarter backers.

The hardcover edition will feature decorative endpapers, a bookplate page - backers will be given the option for me to fill in the name on the bookplate, in BITC script - and the text of the story's original ending (before I tampered with it for the sake of the flow of the story). Additionally, all hardcover books will be signed by me (The Illustrator). 

The hardcover book is more-or-less a Kickstarter exclusive; which is to say, the smallest number of them that I can order is 12, and so if fewer than a dozen people purchase them...well, then I'll have a few extras after the fact, to distribute according to my whim; but otherwise, this is the only time and place you can get one!  

The softcovers, by contrast, I will be over-ordering on purpose. I hope to have copies available in several local bookshops soon after printing; although no details whatsoever have been nailed down just yet, my initial inquiries have received positive replies. So that's some exciting news I may have for you down the road! Stay tuned. 

Someone asked me the other day, in jest, whether the book, being about depression, was going to be printed entirely in shades of grey. 

But hey, it's not just about depression - it's about depression, and anxiety, and love, and fear, and sadness, and it's about the idea -- the hope -- that by taking a stab at synaesthetic representation, we might be able to help communicate some aspect of that experience. I don't claim to know what it's like for everyone else, but my experience of the brain-weirdness-spectrum requires a full field of colours to tell you what it's like. 

And they're going to be printed gorgeously. <3

-----------------------------------------------------------

Postscript:

It's hard to make this update, today, when I know everyone is distracted and reeling from the results of the Brexit vote -- I certainly am.

I don't have an Opinion; in fact, I work hard not to have one, because the universe is always in flux, and Opinions tend to be rigid. But: i can offer some thoughts, and a feeling. 

This book emerged from the ashes of a relationship that was tested, among other things, by the sheer unlikelihood - geographic, financial, and bureaucratic - that we, the Author and the Illustrator, would ever be able to confidently live in the same country. Over the course of my time in the UK, as I was exploring every option at my disposal to stay there a little longer, the country seemed to become more isolationist before my very eyes.
I kind of get it; it's a small island. There are concerns about resource management, economics, a myriad of matters that I don't fully grasp and won't pretend to; furthermore I don't intend to sit here and blame my breakup solely on global-scale geopolitical factors.

Here's what I know, though, one small thing: borders make love harder. And love is already pretty hard. So that's what I'm thinking about, today. 

Try to keep choosing love, you guys.