Welcome one and all to The Infinite Bard! Our mystical tavern full of storytellers, merrymakers, a roaring fire, and an unlimited supply of your favorite refreshing beverage is always open once you know the way.
I hope you’ll sit down, relax, and let the tales take you away for a much-needed break from everyday life. You might just find a new favorite bard among our number. You can sample the wares of other featured tale-spinners at my Infinite Bard page.
Read on for my second turn on the Infinite Bard stage, a romantic tale about a crowdfunding campaign that gets a bit too successful. I hope you enjoy Real People Romance: An Adventure in Crowdfunding!
In case you missed my first three turns on the Infinite Bard stage, be sure to check out Sensing the Storm, a prequel yarn from my Storms of Future Past Series. Odds and Endings: A Lightning Gap Story, the doorway to an ever-growing collection of stories set in an enchanted bookstore in a town full of magic. And The Spider Who Ate the Elephant, a modern myth with a rather unlikely heroine that won second place in the Virginia Writers Club Golden Nib Contest.
For more of my fiction, including exclusive free short stories and discounts, early pre-sales, and adorable pet photos, pay a visit to The Confidential Adventure Club.
Hope to see you there!
When your campaign goes too well!
Thrilled to help his best friend create a great crowdfunding campaign for her writing, Henry hosts a watch party. All of them cheering on her series called Real People Romance.
The cute guy attending makes Henry’s night even better.
Until demand for one goofy reward gets out of hand.
Find out what happens when a project gets more support than the creators planned for.
Real People Romance: An Adventure in Crowdfunding
Henry McFarland tried to hide his smile as he surveyed the crowd gathered in his temporarily expanded living room. Eleven people, all clutching some kind of beverage, none of them far from nervous handfuls from huge bowls of chips or fruit or popcorn. All leaning forward on the mismatched chairs and sofas and loveseats brought in from various studio spaces in the huge loft apartment.
Old fashioned velvet wingback mixed with casual and low-slung mixed with black leather and steel modern. Colors and textures that harmonized with one of the various backdrops in the studios, but left Henry thankful for soft lamplight with them all jumbled together.
The ceiling and several of the walls throughout the loft were painted black, but if he turned on the overhead work lights, his eyes would be crying for mercy.
Everyone occupying the mishmash of style and era focused on a big, undeniably modern flatscreen in the corner. Each person silent and tense with concentration.
Not watching game seven of the World Series or some other kind of sports. Nor a dramatic television season finale or even a hot new streaming movie.
Not this extra-nerdy crowd. Even they wouldn’t watch anything so typical with Henry’s collection of low-key movie scores playing in the background.
This circle of Henry’s closest friends mixed in with a few strangers were instead captivated with a website. A site that wasn’t streaming a concert or other live event, or even a controversial speech or something relatively normal.
Everyone gathered around Henry was as interested as he was on a crowdfunding website, NerdNest to be exact. Intently watching the progress of a newly launched book publishing campaign.
Henry wasn’t sure if that was more or less goofy and odd than worrying over some kind of board game or tech gadget.
The star of this odd little show sat front and center, perched forward on the edge of an oversized paisley sofa that Henry had actually bought for himself rather than the studio. He’d known his best friend Jessica Gonzales since before she’d first started kicking around the idea of writing almost fifteen years ago.
Henry and Jess had supported each other through her fits of the writer’s block she no longer believed in, and his own past fits of feeling like an artistic sellout when he took commercial or industrial photography jobs to pay the bills.
Without Jess and her signature mix of sweet supportive “you can do this” and damn salty “get over yourself and get it done,” Henry would never have had any kind of success as a photographer, much less had enough to own this sprawling loft on the outskirts of Atlanta.
The very least he could do was host the watch party for her very first crowdfunding campaign for her writing.
Jess stuck out her tongue then, and Henry finally did laugh. Caught him watching her.
She tucked her chin-length brown hair behind her ear and covered both eyes, but she was grinning. The rest of the group—as mixed up and diverse and fascinating as the cast of characters in her romance novels—glanced at her, smiled, then went back to staring at the monitor.
New pledges popped in every couple of minutes, driving the count closer to her $6000 goal.
Henry mimed holding a drink up to his lips, not surprised when Jess nodded and popped up from the sofa immediately. That little sign for “Do you need an excuse?” had been getting them both through stressful moments since long before either of them could legally drink.
He joined her at the open bar, set up on a stainless steel work table against the brick wall between the living room and the kitchen. Jess leaned into his one-armed hug, blowing out her breath in a coffee-scented burst.
“Henry, thank the gods. I was about to start screaming, and I can’t do that to Daisy Girl. She’d never forgive me.”
Henry’s goofy yellow pit bull had happily wagged herself silly and accepted her accustomed hugs and kissies for an hour back when the party started. She was currently snoring up a storm in his bedroom, probably with her blocky head on his pillow.
“Daisy only gets upset if people leave without paying her their proper respects. How’s it going?”
He busied his hands making each of them a gin and tonic, doing his best not to catch her fidgety nervous energy. Jess fussed with straightening out the tiny napkins, silver and black and deep royal purple to match the new branding on her upcoming book covers.
“I thought y’all were all insane, wanting to watch the day this crazy thing launched. No way enough people would care about books I wrote ten years ago coming out with new covers to fund it in twenty-one days, much less twenty-four hours. But now…”
Henry handed her a glass full of bubbly tonic, gin, and a couple of cubes of ice, a thin sliver of lime dancing within.
“But you’re about to watch it happen.” Henry held up his glass. “Here’s to the launch of Real People Romance. And the re-launch of Jessica Gonzales.”
Before the clink of their glasses faded, someone called from closer to the monitor.
“Better get in here, Ms. Thing. Lines are about to be crossed!”
Sure enough, by the time Henry and Jess got close enough to see the monitor, the red numbers at the top had clicked over to $6000 and turned green. Digital fireworks flashed across the screen, and a banner popped up at the top.
Congratulations, Real People Romance, NerdNest Fledgling Campaign!
The room erupted into cheers, and Henry picked Jess up, whispering into her ear.
“I knew you could do it.”
She kissed his cheek. “Get ready to pull your hair out trying to teach me cover design.”
Daisy Girl charged into the room with a curious “woof,” and Jess joined the wagging pit bull in a joyful circuit of the room. Henry leaned closer to the monitor, wondering what reward had kicked the campaign over the top barely twelve hours after it started.
“Oh, this could get ugly,” he said under his breath.
Tucked way down toward the bottom of the rewards list, under various collections of ebooks and print books and keychains and signed things. A reward Henry had been certain would be too silly for more than a handful of extremely dedicated fans to take. And local-to-Atlanta fans, at that.
Who would actually wantto travel to the city, to Henry’s studio, just to have a photo shoot with the cover models for revised covers that didn’t even exist yet? He’d suggested it in the midst of a weary giggling fit with Jess, both of them sick to death of looking at NerdNest’s terms and conditions and what seemed like an absurd number of fields to fill out.
A bit of ridiculous, shoot-for-the-moon silliness that maybe five or six people would do for $200, maybe as a joke, right? Even with the bonus of taking home a custom print-on-demand cover for that book, with themselves on it, wouldn’t be enough to get many people to spend that much.
Would it?
But as Henry stared at the screen, the number for that reward ticked from twenty-one to twenty-two. He jumped when someone spoke from right beside him.
“Oh honey, you look like you just saw a ghost.”
One of Jess’s friends, a guy cute enough that Henry had noticed every time he was around but hadn’t really spoken to. A little shorter than Henry, African-American, dressed as always in a vivid combination only he could pull off. Tonight it was the same royal purple as the napkins, paired with rich copper. The same colors decorated the swirling patterns cut into his natural hair.
“A ghost of trouble still to come, maybe,” Henry said. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember…”
“Andre Telkin.” He took Henry’s offered hand in a warm grasp.
“Oh, you’re the one Jess based Audrey on. Where’s your friend, Diane maybe? I’m rotten with names, not the best skill for a photographer.”
Andre grinned, and the humor and welcome of it drove Henry’s embarrassment away. He caught the light glinting off the pea-sized cochlear implant behind Andre’s ear, a trait fictional Audrey shared that readers had adored.
Henry adored the way the book’s cover matched the purple and copper in Andre’s hair, almost as much as he adored that big grin.
“Yes, I surely did inspire Audrey, and Telly in the next book. I’m contractually obligated to point out that was her first big seller. You’re thinking of Dana, my introvert alter-ego. She’s stuck on some big work project this week. A prisoner of the server room dungeon.”
Henry nodded, smiling himself now.
“Yeah, I sympathize. I think I just landed myself in a dungeon with an ill-thought out reward.”
Andre glanced at the screen, then turned back with an eyebrow raised.
“You mean those photo shoots? I wondered how much the models were going to cost for those.”
Henry winced. “You mean the twenty-five we have now? That’s going to be a massive cut into the funding on this. Probably more than we have coming in, especially with individual print-on-demand copies.”
Andre darted to the side, taking Jess by the arm. “Gonna have to change a setting on your NerdNest there, sweetheart. Put a limit on those photo shoots before you have a hundred rabid fans trooping through Henry’s nest.”
Jess started to glance at the screen, then did a double-take so broad and obvious that Henry had to choke back a laugh. He made the mistake of meeting Andre’s gaze, and they both fell into a most immature fit of arm grabbing and giggling.
Even through the rising distress in his belly, Henry didn’t miss the welcome tingle at Andre’s touch.
“Holy crap, Henry,” Jess said. “I never thought… Twenty-seven now?”
Andre pushed both of them toward Jess’s laptop, perched on a wooden lighting crate in front of the big monitor.
“Y’all go log in and fix this before it’s too late!”
By the time Jess got into the account and navigated to the rewards panel, all still on the big screen, the number of photo shoots was up to thirty-three. She set the limit at thirty-five and hit save.
Everyone in the room, led by Andre, burst into a louder round of shouts and applause than they had when the campaign passed its goal only a few minutes ago.
Daisy Girl danced in a circle, grabbed her favorite neon pink squeaky bone, and walked from person to person shaking her head and squeaking it madly.
By the time Henry looked back at the screen, the number was sitting at thirty-five with a Sold Out banner beside it. He collapsed onto a pink and white polka-dotted footstool that blended perfectly with the current Eighties setup in one of the studios. Not so much in the living room.
Daisy Girl settled with a great sigh, head on his feet, squeaky toy between her front paws.
“Real People Romance raised seven thousand dollars with that little reward,” Jess said, her eyes wide. “Thirty-five people contributed. Over a joke!”
“Yeah, well.” Henry rubbed the back of his neck. “I wish we could take about thirty of them back.”
“Why?” Jess said. “How bad is it?”
Henry shook his head. “Not now, in the middle of your victory party. We can deal with it tomorrow.”
Jess put an arm around his shoulders and squeezed.
“Listen, we’re among friends here. Thanks to me goofing up and not turning the big screen off, they already know we messed up on the campaign.”
Andre cleared his throat dramatically and rolled his eyes.
“Switch back to the total, Jess,” he said. “I’m not sure how you can call getting…close to thirteen thousand dollars with a six thousand goal messing up. On day one, no less. You two may have to recalibrate, sure. But do you see how many people want to support you and get these books out there? You’re sitting in a room full of us, in case you didn’t notice.”
Henry looked up at Jess, not willing to spill it unless she was okay. She smiled and waved her arm toward the group. Henry rubbed his face and sighed.
“Okay, but be easy on me. I feel dumb for suggesting it now, even as a joke. I figured I had the studio here, and we’d be booking the models for the new covers anyway. I thought with the five or six people who might want to do this, we could fit them in with the other shoots. Now we’re talking separate sessions, and probably different contract terms than an individual shoot. Honestly, we could easily end up paying more for these than the whole campaign brings in.”
After a few seconds of silence broken only by Daisy Girl’s snores, Andre spoke.
“Have you signed the contracts with the models yet? The ones on the old covers?”
Henry shook his head.
“We can’t afford a lot of the original models for new books coming up, much less the revised covers. That was part of what got this whole idea started. Once I realized they’d moved on to bigger and better things, I started thinking about reworking the older books, too.”
“He gently suggested I could do some actual branding this time,” Jess said with a grin. “Not the same random ‘Oooooh, that font looks cool!’ approach I’ve used in the past. Henry’s determined to teach me InDesign so I can do the layout myself instead of paying someone, if he doesn’t wring my neck first.”
“Keep that up and I’ll make you actually learn Photoshop, too,” Henry said. “So no, no contracts yet. This whole thing was going to help get enough shots to use on a whole bunch of books.” He looked up at Jess again. “I guess we could use stock photos instead. They’d be cheaper.”
She shrugged. “We could, but part of what I wanted to do was have models who actually have something in common with the characters. Not the same old abs and boobs shots, you know? Different kinds of people. From different places, with different bodies.”
“Like the people you write about, sweetie,” Andre said.
He held out a hand to Jess. She squeezed for a second, and let go. Henry was surprised by a strong wish that Andre would hold his hand, and not just for a second.
With everything else going on, and his mind was busy reenacting a scene from one of Jess’s books?
“Okay, listen,” Andre said, crossing his arms. “I’ve either had too much to drink or not quite enough, but here goes. We all know you use us for characters all the time, Jess. With love, of course!”
He air-kissed theatrically at Jess before he went on.
“So why not use us for the covers? We all know a couple of knockouts we could round up for anyone who really wants that, but I’d bet we’ll do just fine. The talented Mr. Henry here can touch us up and make us look even better than we already do. We wouldn’t be the same old faces, that’s for damn sure.”
Henry blinked, grunting under his breath. Besides Andre with his fantastic hair and implant and dark skin, he saw their friends of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds, all of them nodding and smiling.
One with the dark glasses of the visually impaired. Another with an artificial leg. One fresh out of college, one with sparkling silver hair. Two a different gender than they’d had at birth.
Others floated through his mind’s eye, all imperfect and beautiful.
Jess moved her arm away from his shoulders to wipe at her eyes, and Henry realized this was exactly who she wrote about. Her characters weren’t all the same nationality or skin color, living wealthy and healthy and typical, all young and perfectly able.
She wrote about her friends and loved ones, the true family who were so eager to support her that they’d gathered tonight to watch a website, of all things.
These were the kinds of characters who found Happily Ever After in her stories. And her readers were the real people who wanted Real People Romance out in the world.
“This is who it’s all for, Jess,” he said. “Not a bunch of perfect models. That’s not who your fans would want pictures with anyway.”
She nodded, tears still rolling down her cheeks.
“You should see the messages I get. People come to book signings a lot more weepy than I am right now, all the time.”
Andre stepped up beside Jess and caught her up in a big hug. When he stepped back with an arm still around her waist, one warm hand rested lightly on Henry’s shoulder.
It was everything Henry could do to keep a giddy, goofy smile off his face. He didn’t want to stop the goosebumps that raced across his skin.
“They love you because you see them, Jess,” Andre said. “They see themselves in what you write instead of the same old thing. I know I do. Still waiting for that Happily Ever After thing, though.”
Andre winked down at Henry, and Henry’s silly smile broke through at last. He didn’t bother trying to hide it anymore.
“So you’re all up for this crazy idea?” Henry said. “I’m not about to let you work with no contract and no pay at all, but I’m sure we can work something out that suits us all.”
The whole crowd cheered one more time, and Daisy Girl jerked her head up. She sneezed twice, shook her ears, and settled back down on Henry’s foot.
Jess leaned down and kissed the top of Henry’s head, then Andre’s cheek.
“Well okay then,” she said. “Every last one of you are officially the best friends ever. Quick, get me something to drink so we can toast whatever mad thing we just created.”
Henry shifted Daisy Girl’s head with an apologetic ear rub, then got up to help with the quick pours and mixes. Wine and water, spirit and soda distribution underway, he stood between Andre and Jess.
He took a deep breath, then leaned closer to Andre.
“So Andre, you going to be okay with spending more time around here?”
Andre grinned and ducked his head, and Henry’s heart melted.
“Already looking forward to it, handsome.” He stepped closer until his shoulder touched Henry’s.
Maybe they were caught in a scene from one of Jess’s books.
And Henry truly hoped they stayed there.
Jess leaned in between the two of them. “About time you two caught a clue. Can we do this toast now?”
She held up her glass, waiting until everyone else did the same.
“To the best friends in the world. And to Real People Romance!”
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed Real People Romance: An Adventure in Crowdfunding as much as I enjoyed writing it!
And be sure to browse through all the other wonderful tales available at my Infinite Bard page. You just might find another favorite storyteller.
This story is available from your favorite ebook retailer and in paperback.
For more with Andre, check out my Dana Sanderson Short Mysteries and Terminalia stories. And if you’re in the mood for more romance short stories, consider Partners in Romance, a joint project between me and my real life partner in romance, Jason A. Adams.
In case you missed my first three turns on the Infinite Bard stage, be sure to check out Sensing the Storm, a prequel yarn from my Storms of Future Past Series. Odds and Endings: A Lightning Gap Story, the doorway to an ever-growing collection of stories set in an enchanted bookstore in a town full of magic. And The Spider Who Ate the Elephant, a modern myth with a rather unlikely heroine that won second place in the Virginia Writers Club Golden Nib Contest.
For more of my fiction, including exclusive free short stories and discounts, early pre-sales, and adorable pet photos, pay a visit to The Confidential Adventure Club.
Real People Romance: An Adventure in Crowdfunding
Copyright © 2020 by Kari A. Kilgore
All rights reserved
Published 2020 by Spiral Publishing, Ltd.
www.SpiralPublishing.net
Book and cover design copyright © 2020 by Spiral Publishing, Ltd.
Cover art copyright © 2020 by Rawpixel | Depositphotos.com
Print ISBN-13: 979-8-6407-4638-9
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
