Well crap, I really am terrible at this whole "keeping updated" thing, aren't I? Ah well, life soldiers on without being watched - as does progress on Land & Sea!
As predicted way back in the last post, the second publisher also declined our little story, and we are thus moving forward with our original vision of doing everything ourselves to make Land & Sea available to the public. To bring you up to speed:
Andrew is in grad school at the University of Iowa. He is trying very hard to be a good, productive student, so doing anything extracurricular - like resizing files, finding old artwork or emails, or even just getting together to watch zombie movies - takes much longer than it normally would. On the plus side, he's making amazing art and learning tons, and has just booked a trip to Europe in the summer. Let's see if those two years of High School Spanish finally come in handy!
Drew spent November taking part in National Novel Writing Month, where he put together 50,000 words in 30 days. Immediately after that, he applied to a fellowship program in Provincetown, MA, managed to survive the holidays, and then took his wife to Ireland for their 3-year anniversary. (Irish Thai food is delicious! Or maybe that's just all Thai food . . .) The next month or so was taken up with another fellowship application, this one for a First Book manuscript - which was successfully submitted on March 1st. Since then, Drew has been getting back into gear to make the Big Push toward publishing Land & Sea.
Here's what's happening there -
If this project were a fortune cookie, the inedible part would read, "The way is fraught with difficulty." Fortunately, life is not made of indecipherable desserts, so I'll just say, "We're working on it." We've decided to release Land & Sea primarily in an electronic format, through Amazon.com - but we both really want a physical book to keep on our shelves as proof that our art degrees were worth something. To that end, we're planning a limited release of Land & Sea - a small print run that we'll fund through pre-orders on Kickstarter (providing Kickstarter, Amazon's Payment Plans and the local Credit Union can all get their rears in gear sometime this year - seriously, they're as unresponsive as we are!). We'll be offering a small selection of reward tiers for your perusing pleasure, including the actual, real, physical, actual book! In my head, this should take no more than one week from now to put all the various pieces together - but my head is often a silly, silly place, and therefore that projection may have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
So, maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow (although if it was, that'd be awesome). But sometime soon, we will take our next major step in bridging the gap between the story that I have in my head (and on my hard drive) and the curious minds of severals of people throughout the entire people-I-know-isphere.
Stay tuned. It's only going to get better.
