Support the Artists to Support the Arts - The Consortium

It’s been a thrilling week! My niece had a birthday, my daughter learned to read three new words, and I doubled my knowledge of VBA scripting, bought a videogame, and devoured the nearly-final-draft of my friend Becca’s novel Flawed: The Empath.

And, of course, that doesn’t even touch on the exciting things going on with the Consortium. Let’s take a look:

Programming

This week I did some serious research into what it takes to digitally publish a novel, and I see some great opportunities for Consortium Programming to turn Consortium Writing into a world-class e-stributor. (Sorry for that.)

I’m still conceptualizing it, but this week I started designing a major new project that would provide a robust Document Production Environment using the powerful and reliable Google Docs suite as a backend. It would be like Scrivener online. Or…WordPress for books. Or, better yet, like an IDE for documentation projects (but how many writers are going to get that metaphor?).

Anyway, it’s ambitious, but it would build on a lot of the work we’re already doing with Google Docs digital publishing and WordPress convenience integration, so it might not be too grand a plan. We’ll see.

Speaking of that Google Docs digital publishing, I also invested this week in a copy of ePub Straight to the Point (affiliate link), which promises to help us design beautiful and effective layout and design in our e-Books (something e-Books famously lack). I’ll let you know how that goes.

Music

I also unintentionally opened the Consortium School of Music this week.

Well, no, nothing that dramatic really, but Sean introduced me to his friend Thomas Beard, when we met for lunch on Tuesday. Turns out Thomas is a musician with experience writing ambient music for videogames, and just that morning on my walk I’d decided The Third Dragonswarm needed some compelling ambient music.

Better yet, Thomas had some samples of his stuff, and it’s astonishingly good. I’m fighting against an urge to pull all my programmers off all their other tasks and commit them 100% to making the game playable, just so I can put Thomas’s music in it.

That’s a fun place to be…but not super practical. We still lack the art resources necessary to really make the game a professional product (which is the main thing I’m so excited about with the music), so we’re still better off pushing ahead with some of our boring ol’ useful applications, for now. I’m looking for milestones, though, and constantly rewriting the Game Design Document in the back of my head, ready to dive back in.

Again, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Oh! And lest I sell my other artists short, it’s not as though Thomas is the first musician in the Consortium. Carlos is an accomplished player (if you haven’t checked out his profile page yet, check it out now!), and Julie’s been picking up the ukulele in her free time at a prodigious speed.

In fact, I suspect I’m the only artist in the Consortium who’s not some manner of musician. Thomas is just the first one I’ve put to work in that capacity.

Writing

This week has also offered some incredibly new opportunities for the Consortium. I’ve been investigating freelance grant writing (as you may have seen over at Unstressed Syllables), which I hoped could prove a valuable source of funding for some of my more interesting plans.

I’ve actually been considering the possibility for a while, but last weekend I entered into a tentative arrangement with my first client. Referrals and credentials are everything to freelance sales, so the first few jobs are often the hardest to get. This seems like a great opportunity for me to learn the ropes, earn some phenomenal word of mouth, help out a good cause…and probably bring in some award money for the Consortium, too.

I also learned about a potential ghost writing project that would be much closer to my existing skill set — which is to say, it would be easier and take less time, while still providing all the benefits the other project offers, too. That one’s not a done deal yet, and I’m probably not supposed to say much about it, but I thought you’d be interested in the opportunities that are constantly popping up, unexpected — and every one of them holds immense promise for making the Consortium’s vision a reality.

Stay tuned. Things are going to get interesting.