(this is a transcript of the video)

Hi! My name's Adam Cadre. I'm guessing that if you've landed on this page, you're familiar with at least some of my work, but let me start with an introduction anyway. I'm a writer in a bunch of different media: I've had a novel published, I've written and programmed several works of interactive fiction, I've worked on a bunch of movies for major studios (that I'm not allowed to talk about), I have a webcomic, I've written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of essays ranging from book and movie reviews to history to personal pieces. You may know me from some of my other projects, from Wikipedia Brown to the Lyttle Lytton Contest to Stochastic Planet. But probably what I'm known for above all else is a piece of interactive fiction called Photopia. Photopia won first place in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition and wound up becoming kind of a landmark in computer game history, apparently. A lot of people say it pioneered a new direction for the medium.

Other people say it shouldn't have been in an interactive medium at all - that it should've just been a movie or something. And a few years ago the movie rights were optioned and I ended up being brought in to do the adaptation. The movie ended up as a casualty of the financial collapse, but I had a full screenplay on my hands and the novelization rights, so I started turning it into a book. But then my work on the Photopia movie started getting me other screenwriting work, and that's what's taken most of my time these last few years. After I finished working on my last movie, I thought it was about time I finally returned to working on my own stuff, starting with the Photopia book. But then I thought: if people read and like the Photopia book, they might decide to also read my first novel, Ready, Okay! - and I'm a much better writer now than I was when I wrote that, and I wanted to bring it up to my current standard before anyone else read it. I'd been meaning to get Ready, Okay! out in ebook form anyway, so I figured I'd do some quick edits before returning to the Photopia novel. And... those quick edits have turned into a total rewrite. Right now I'm about 2/3 of the way through.

So here's the deal. I am committed to finishing both of these projects, but the timetable is up in the air. Cranking them out before my savings run out has become unrealistic. When this has happened in the past I've taken on a day job - I was a tutor for many years - but the tradeoff is that progress on my personal work tends to slow down by orders of magnitude when I do that. So people have been telling me to try this crowdfunding thing the kids are so nutty about these days. I'm setting the target amount really low because this isn't the sort of all-or-nothing project where I need to buy a certain quantity of tantalum capacitors in order to develop the prototype of my gadget; this is to keep the power on and put food in the fridge while I finish up these books. I figure that every $2500 buys me about a month of writing time, and the longer I can put off giving up all my time to a day job, the sooner the books will be done. So if you contribute to the Indiegogo campaign, that money will go toward my expenses while working on the Ready, Okay! ebook, including direct expenses like hiring a copyeditor. Any money that remains once that ebook is out will be rolled over to the Photopia novel. (If you contribute to the Patreon campaign, those funds will go toward maintaining some sort of regular creative output: working on the books, of course, but also things like Calendar articles.) So, thanks very much for your time, and I hope you'll consider supporting my work!