Fairy Tales

Marmaduke Mousington

Marm fake cover

I met Amy and Rob, who are the estate for the painter Josh Kirby last year at the Discworld convention in the UK. We hit it off immediately, and Amy seemed to know that I would be the person she wanted to illustrate her uncle’s unfinished children’s book. We’ve been going back on this project full-on for a number of months, and it’s finally ready to present to the world. This is a huge honor, and an enormous amount of fun. A very silly book about a time traveling mouse. Right up my alley!

Click here to watch our very silly video:

 

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Fairy Tales AM HERE!

A truck dropped off an enormous pile of hardcover books at my house last week, and now my garage is full of them!

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We have been packaging up all the kickstarter preorders like crazy. The first wave is away, all that would fit in the car. We’re working on wave two – waiting to get the audio book finished, and the tshirts back from the tshirtatorium. Anybody’s order who includes one of them is going to have to wait a smidge longer, as I’m expecting them O SO SHORTLY. Basically, everybody in the US should be getting their order before Christmas. International people – if your order was simple, I’m gonna go with probably, but I’m not entirely sure. I may be figuring out a friend in the UK who I can ship a big pile of books to, and then have them ship the books out individually – crunching some numbers to see how effective that would be. International rates have gone up ALOT since I did all the math for the Kickstarter in June. Probably just the Christmas making the post office explode.IMG_7582

The book looks FANTASTIC. It’s big, it’s shiney, it’s brilliant. I have caught FIVE count them FIVE typos so far, in accordance with Gaiman’s law. All of these are typos that crept in AFTER the book got professionally edited. I tweaked some sentences in the last minute, and was apparently quite sleep deprived. There are two misspellings, one word oddly missing, and two spacing issues with words smunched together. Fortunately, I make up enough words that some of these should pass unnoticed. To the people who do do the typo noticing, I’d like to point out that 98% of the book is spelled correctly : )

The pictures look so fabulous, I am so fortunate to have gotten the artists I did to heap their talents upon this book.

We are having a book release party SATURDAY DECEMBER 20th at ‘Collectors Paradise’ a comic book store at 131 Winnetka Ave, Winnetka, CA. If you are at all in the neighborhood that evening, and are able to drop by, we would really enjoy it. There will be food and drink, free drawings and prizes, dinosaurs, and an art gallery showing of some of the most exceptional pieces from the book.  I’ll be doing another blog post about that shortly with more details.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Oh yeah, I had a baby. Well, my wife had the baby, but I helped. Wellington Friesen is now 1 month old, and everytime we think we’re used to his schedule, he changes them. We are the kind of sleep deprived that all parents will appreciate. He’s crazy cute, and I can’t wait to read this book to him as a bedtime story, and have him know what I’m talking about : )

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Kickstarter Update!

After 4 very full and busy weeks, the Fairy Tales I Just Made Up Kickstarter concluded, and we made 101% of the money we asked for. I am so grateful and proud and tired, I can’t even stand it.

Apologies for mostly silence since then, after the kicking ended, I got caught up on sleep, chores, and other personal stuff I had been neglecting, including flying to St. Louis to attend a wedding.

Today, kickstarter/amazon finally released all the funds into my actual bank account (it takes a while to run credit cards and transfer money, what can I say?) which means I am now able to physically roll around in a giant pile of all my wonderful backers’ dollars. Well, I mean I could, if I felt like withdrawing it all as $1 bills, and finding my Scrooge McDuck hat. I probably won’t, actually, that sounds pretty complicated, and I do have photoshop after all…

So what I’ll really be doing is writing a whopping big check to the printers, so they can get started transforming stuff that came out of my brain into ink and paper! The printers are supposed to take about 6 weeks to do that, then ship them to me on a big truck. Once I get the books back in my hot little hands, I’ll repackage and send ’em to all of you! Along with all the other rewards you got, like the audio book, tshirt, etc. This gives me a couple weeks to actually make the audio tshirts.

I’m going to wait until the print copy is available before I send the digital edition out to the digital only people. I hadn’t mentioned this before, but it seems more fair now that I think about it. Today is Aug 25th, which means I’ll likely have books in hand October 15ish. The same week that Michelle is estimated to deliver our baby… Huh. Didn’t think that all the way through… So I guess while I don’t have a 100% accurate idea of when everybody will receive their swag, I can firmly say “Probably November.”

Basically, as soon as I am physically able to jam books in envelopes, I will!

Thank you again to absolutely everybody, and a double thank you to a very special person, they know who they are. 

(Psst! It was YOU all along!)

Hugs!

Ray

 
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