Tag Archives: Kickstarter

Support the first-ever Queens Book Festival

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New York City has been a longtime hub for writers, publishers, and literary events. Though when people think New York City, they tend to think Manhattan over any of the so-called outer boroughs. This despite the fact that most New Yorkers, and most writers, live in those outer boroughs, including Queens. Queens has the distinction of being the most culturally diverse borough in the entire city, and it’s the home of many of New York City’s artists and writers.

Queens has never held a book festival to celebrate its local authors and artists, and I would say an inaugural event is long overdue. I’ve been a resident of Queens since 2001, and I was happy to discover its burgeoning literary community, which includes a literary journal, a number of reading series and some great independent bookstores and coffeehouses.

Folks from that community have come together to launch the first-ever Queens Book Festival, and we need your support to make it happen. The Festival has a Kickstarter campaign with a big menu of fantastic sponsorship packages, at all donation levels. Every dollar helps!

I included their Kickstarter video below, and you can check out the donation page here.

 

 

Queens Book Festival Kickstarter Video

Queens Book Festival Kickstarter Campaign Video 1

Kings, Queens and In-Betweens

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My friend Gabrielle Burton is working on a spectacular project to raise awareness of gender expression diversity and human rights.

She’s the director of the documentary “Kings, Queens and In-Betweens,” which profiles the lives of a wide spectrum drag performers in Columbus, Ohio. The film illuminates a vibrant gender-bending community in the small city of Columbus. Produced by Five Sisters Productions, a family-run company which Gabrielle helms, the documentary will be a powerful tool for public education and advocacy regarding transgender rights and LGBT equality initiatives such as marriage equality.

Burton has started a Kickstarter campaign for production and distribution of the film. I made a pledge. Can you? I’ve included the really fun trailer with Burton explaining the film below.

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via Kickstarter

And here’s a disclosure and a fun fact. Gabrielle was my date to our high school prom. This was well before I came out to her, or myself for that matter. But I guess we were in a sense a high school gender-bending couple. 🙂

 

 

 

Girls, Girls, Girls

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A bit of false advertising, but I couldn’t resist.

This is not my foray into porn spamming, and I’m not writing rock-n-roll odes.

You might be asking yourself: what does a gay male writer know about girls?

Not much romantically, although there was that confused period in my adolescence. I’ve made my apologies to my former girlfriends, and I don’t think any lasting harm was done.

This was just my sneaky way to share an important project that brings much needed, strong female lead characters to young adult fantasy, in this case the superhero(ine) genre.

Cover art by Marvel comics cover artist Stephanie Hans

Author Kelly Thompson has launched a dynamic Kickstarter campaign to promote her self-pubbed novel THE GIRL WHO WOULD BE KING. There are amazing packages for donors at all levels, including: signed print copies of the book, cool artwork by Thompson (who is a kickass artist in addition to an author), and access to a fan forum for live chat that takes you behind the scenes of the story.

I made a pledge. You can too.

Beyond the excellent girl-empowering story she has to tell through TGWWBK, Thompson explains that her campaign is a way of bringing quality cross-genre literature to readers — a challenge within the traditional publishing model.

As an author who has run up against similar frustrations with a hard-to-categorize YA novel, I am exceedingly impressed by Thompson’s creativity and vision. She reached her original Kickstarter goal in like a day, and is well on her way to a stretch goal of $25K. The campaign ends July 25th.

Now for a musical interlude.

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via YouTube

I love this song, and have been listening it to it a bit obsessively since I discovered it at the end of an episode of the HBO series “Girls.” Besides a really pleasing soundtrack (Bryan Ferry, Siouxie and the Banshees, Tom Tom Club – yeah, I’m showing my age), the writing and acting are hilarious, poignant and outrageous – keeping things so off-balance that you can’t stop watching. The series also resonates with me personally because my early twenties were a similar kind of horror show, with some great times thrown in.