Back in the Saddle
“Success is on the far side of failure.” – T.J. Watson, founder of IBM
Admittedly, I fell into some depression when last month I didn’t meet my goal at kickstarter. However, the tail-spin is ending and I’m back in the saddle again. I’m still making ATM 9000, of course, but I had to figure out exactly how to do that. I’ve started to think of my last fund-drive as a dry run, wherein I learn from my mistakes and redouble my forces. And sometimes, in order for our commitment to be tested and for us to learn, we need things to fall through. That’s part of what Mr. Watson was getting at, I think.
That realization brought me to Step One: cut down the budget as much as possible, and build it up again from scratch. And so that’s what I did. Over the past few weeks, I did my homework. I’ve spoken with several prop houses — myself, this time — given that the majority of my budget was for specialty props… and did some other research. I still need a few bits of info, but it looks like I may be able to trim the budget down from $5,500 to about $2,500!! This is an incredible step forward for myself and the film, and you can rest assured that once all the info is in — SOON – I’m going to lay out the new budget here on this blog and get moving raising the money again.
I’ve considered setting up a PayPal donations button here at the blog, or I may decide to put together an amended video and try again at kickstarter. I’ll still offer backers rewards. Anybody who wants to offer their opinion as to the pros and cons here is welcome to comment about it.
In the meantime, I have a lot to blog about. I’m going to get back to blogging about the coolest stuff I can find on writing, entertainment in general, and technology. And when there’s info about the film — which there should be regularly — I’ll keep my readers abreast of what’s going on.
I will, in fact, mention one thing right now: I ran across an article today about how scientists have created robots that actually speak out-loud and invent new words themselves. The title of the article, in fact, is “ROBOTS INVENT SPOKEN LANGUAGE, JOIN FACEBOOK.”
How comfortable can we be in the face of growing machine intelligence? What will the first generation of AIs with human-level intelligence think of us? What will later generations of AI think of us, once their intelligence can be measured in hundreds… then thousands… then millions… then trillions of human minds? All I know is this: I, for one, am interested to see what sort of picture a robot would think is sexy enough to put up on its own profile.
Stay tuned. There’s much more to come.
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I’m so glad you’re back at it. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with setbacks. They can only make us stronger though. I wonder if some of Kristen Lamb’s stuff might help. She writes about writers using social media to build a platform. I’m sure it translates right into any other kind of creative venture or business that needs to be built. That and tomorrow there’s a Twitter party for James Rollins new book, The Devil Colony. That might be a good opportunity to get to know some more folk on Twitter, especially Kristen Lamb (she has a blog on WordPress and two books out too). I have some more info about the Twitter party at my blog, if you’re interested. It’s the post called The Devil’s in the…Launch Party.
Thanks so much for your comment! I’m very interested in this Karen Lamb… I’ll look into it. I don’t know what time the Twitter party is, either, but it sounds promising.
Party is today (Tuesday) All day and all night. It’s at the hashtag #DevilColony. Come on by and say hello. Just put #DevilColony in the tweet.
Kristen Lamb’s a great teacher too. I think she has another online class comeing up as well.