I just wanted to thank everyone who has contributed to the Maniac Pixie Dream Girl campaign so far. I cannot express how much your support means to me. This is a brutal business, particularly if you’re a painfully insecure autistic man who is terrible at selling himself in a field where that’s a requirement.
I’ve done enough crowdfunding campaigns to know that only two times really matter: the beginning and the end. In the beginning, there’s hopefully a mad rush of excitement, optimism, and momentum, as you bring something new into the world.
At the end, again, if you’re very lucky, there’s unstoppable momentum and urgency, as your fans help you achieve your literary dream and make a book that is, right now, an abstraction, a glorious reality. In between are two or three weeks where nothing much happens. The electric sense of possibility has long faded, and there’s no real urgency, because you have weeks, not days, to contribute.
These in-between weeks are agonizing. About a week and a half ago, I made the mistake of compulsively checking my overall tally. Boy, was that dumb! I’d check, and the number of supporters would be 111. I’d check two hours later, and it was still 111. I checked the next day, and it was still 111.
Intellectually, rationally, and objectively, I understood why the number wasn’t changing at all, but it did a number on my psyche and self-esteem.
So I mustered up the self-control not to look at the total until it was necessary and the campaign was in the home stretch.
My connection at BackerKit emailed me yesterday to tell me that I was 51 percent of the way toward my goal. I’m glad I didn’t compulsively check my total, because it would have only changed by about $ 400 in a week.
We’re nearing the finish line now. The campaign will end at 4 PM on Thursday. If I don’t reach my 8000 dollar goal, I get nothing. Y’all get nothing. A book I am very excited to write, but am too superstitious to start before/unless I make my goal, will not exist.
It’s sort of like a theatrical production of Peter Pan, only instead of bringing Tinkerbell back to life through applause, you will hopefully be bringing Maniac Pixie Dream Girl to life through your words.
Right now, things are looking a little iffy. I need to raise a little under $4,000 in just under 5 days for it to succeed. I’m super excited about the entries in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Project that I have written but haven’t published yet. Here’s what I’ve done so far:
Monday: Autumn in New York Tuesday: Sweet November (2001) Wednesday: Elizabethtown (a 3000 word, deeply personal essay on a movie I’ve written about extensively) Thursday: Garden State (a 2000-word piece on a movie I inexplicably have never written about
Here’s what I would like to add, but haven’t written about yet: Tuesday: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Wednesday: Almost Famous, Aloha as a MWOF/MPDG piece on Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place Tuesday: It Chapter One (King column)
If it’s just me self-promoting poorly, I will fall short, and that will be very difficult and dispiriting, but with your help, I can make this happen.
To make things obscenely attractive, anyone who buys a physical copy of a book or spends more than 50 dollars gets TWO free ebooks: a PDF of Five Nights at Freddy Got Fingered, to introduce you to Robin Yount, the protagonist of Maniac Pixie Dream Girl, and Questionable Exercises, in Vulgar Completism, a campaign-exclusive collection of deep dives into lowbrow institutions that I conducted for Substack: the SNL and Ernest P. Worrell movies and the Final Destination, Fast and the Furious, Police Academy, Halloween, Silent Night, Deadly Night, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Child’s Play franchises.
If we make it to 10K, I’ll add the complete Friday the 13th franchise to the book. If we hit 12K, I’ll watch and write about all the Leprechaun movies.
I’m excited about all sorts of tiers, like a God-level tier where you pony up the full goal, let me sleep at night, and become my personal hero. Also, I’ll fly to your home to shake your hand, mow your lawn, or babysit your kids as a thank-you. There’s also a homemade, signed, and numbered zine that will now collect the 25 to 27 pieces I wrote for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Project, an MPDG Judge option, where I’ll watch a movie of your choice and decide definitively if it has a proper MPDG, and super-sized versions of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, where you can program an entire season of content of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place because I have to write about twenty films of your choosing.
In case you haven’t been following the MPDG project, here’s what I’ve written up so far:
Life is not easy for a perpetually struggling freelance writer with bipolar 2 and AuDHD and two children with AuDHD in an impossible field, but with your help, I can make this beautiful dream a reality.
Back! Share! Let’s get this baby over the goal line!
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the BackerKit Printopia campaign for my 11th book and second satirical novel, Maniac Pixie Dream Girl. If the campaign is a success, it’ll go a long way toward finally extricating me from financial problems I long feared were impossible and intractable. Nearly thirty years into my career, I need a win for psychological and professional, as well as financial reasons.
We’ve gotten off to a strong start. The campaign has only been live for the past two days or so; we’ve already hit 100 backers. Triple digits, baby! Considering that my last campaign, for Five Nights at Freddy Got Fingered, just squeaked by its 10,000 goal with 183 backers, that’s quite good, but I’d love to steer folks toward the higher tiers because that’s where the moolah truly is.
(crazy kung-fu noises!)
To encourage folks to get in on the Maniac Pixie Dream Girl BackerKit Printopia campaign, I am including a secret extra bonus e-book for everyone who pre-orders a physical book or chooses another option in the fifty-dollar-and-over range. The campaign has a lot of tiers. Possibly too many, but I have a vivid imagination and want to give y’all as many different reasons and ways to give me money as humanly possible.
I trust that you all know what I mean.
The secret extra bonus e-book is entitled Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas Presents Questionable Exercises in Vulgar Completism. It’s a full-spirited defense of vulgar, lowbrow entertainment that collects the series that I’ve written about the Ernest P. Worrell films, all the Saturday Night Live movies, and the Police Academy, The Fast and the Furious, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and Child’s Play franchises.
If we hit 10,000 dollars, I will watch and write about the Friday the 13th movies in their entirety. If we hit 12,000 dollars, I’ll cover all the Leprechaun movies.
Listen to this song! It will change your life! Not for the better, necessarily, but it is a bona fide life-changer!
Questionable Exercises in Vulgar Completism will be a PDF sent to backers a few months after the campaign ends, assuming it is successful (I am superstitious and deeply concerned about jinxing, as all 50-year-old veteran authors are). If we make the stretch goals, it will take a month or two longer, because I’ll have to watch all those movies and write them up. On a related note, I really want to watch all the Friday the 13th movies, as they are a strange blind spot in my horror film education.
So please consider becoming a backer! I just made a sweet-ass deal even better!
Incidentally, in the spirit of Donald Trump’s $5,000 bribe for voting Republican, I was going to give a crisp $ 500 bill to everyone who backs my book, but I crunched the numbers and couldn’t make it work. Sorry! But honestly, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas Presents Questionable Exercises in Vulgar Completism is better than 500 bucks.
I was supposed to do a livestream today at 4 EST, but I am afraid I'll have to cancel because I can't figure out how to do a livestream on Twitch. I was hoping that it would be like Substack, where you just press a button, but it seems like there are 17 steps to doing it on BackerKit, and I couldn't t make it past the first one.
I apologize to the two or three people who were looking forward to it! I might try to do it via Substack, but man oh man, I am flummoxed when it comes to Twitch.
The campaign has been up for just over 24 hours, and we've already made nearly $3,000! At the very least, it would be swell to get past 3K. It would be splendid if we got to four thousand today or tomorrow, as that would be 50 percent of the goal on the very second day.
There are a lot of big-ticket items among the tiers. I encourage y'all to choose them so that I can make money and feel happy and successful. I'm not going to say that my self-esteem and self-image are inexorably tied to how this campaign does, but my self-esteem and self-image are inexorably tied to how well this campaign does
Anywho, here's a list of the movies I've written so far ranked according to quality.
Don't sleep on this awesome crowd-funding opportunity!
We're only two days away from launching the campaign, and boy, oh boy, am I nervous! You never know how these things will go and what the public will think until it's go time. I've done a bunch of these before, but it never gets easier and always requires a combination of hard work, experience, vision, and dumb luck.
So when the magic happens around noon on Thursday, please support this project any way you can. Pledge (obviously), but also share the word wherever you can! I REALLY need Thursday to be a VERY good day, and y'all are the key to opening strong.
I've done a fairly massive pre-launch campaign for this, which I haven't done for any of my other campaigns. I hope it pays off!
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