The Kickstarter Diaries (part 4) | Final 24 hours of Gourmand Go
Continuing my campaign diary as the the Gourmand Go crowdfunder enters its last hours. Plus, a mini essay about the deeper inspirations and influences for the book.
Today it’s Gourmand Go all the ding dong day as we enter the final 24 hours of the campaign. We’re funded, we’ve hit a stretch goal, and we’ve announced a second stretch goal: a new illustrated prose short added to the book.
I’d love to finish strong. If you’ve been thinking about ordering up a meal, time is running out, I’m afraid.
If you would like a taste test, this button will give you the first chapter:
The Kickstarter Diaries
Day 18: 11/112023
The weekend! Woof. My kid spawn me sleep in a bit today. While he was off at Japanese school I had the house to myself. Spent the morning preparing the previous substack post, which I decided was substantial enough to go out early, as well as doing some social media for Gourmand Go.
Not much happening on that front, though. We picked up one backer, and 1%, and we’re still 4% shy of the stretch goal. I had imagined the ‘dead zone’ would just be the middle section of the campaign, but it looks like it’s closer to 2/3 of the campaign in this case. Maybe 3 weeks was too long.
I think we’ll get make that stretch goal if we keep up this trend, although I am hoping for a spike in the last 48 hours.
Went for a short run. I did my usual route backwards and found it quite easy—I think my fitness is picking up again. It’s been tough getting back on it after the brutal cold I had late in winter. I’ll add some distance next time.
Have set an alarm for 2:45am so I can do a Facebook live event with Shugah Chris on the Morning Roast.
Day 19: 12/11/2023
Spawn woke me up with a sore tummy at 12:30am, which was nice. Then my alarm at 2:45am, for 90 minutes on the Morning Roast. I was not caffeinated and was not at my best, but at least I made it this time! Sugah Chris is a character for sure!.
Bleary all day, which I mostly spent playing with my kid. I took him for a bike ride, played some board games with him, made him do his homework. We had lunch at a cafe with my parents and when we came back, we watched a DVD he borrowed from the library. Yes, we still have DVDs in my house. After that, I helped him with a video game and went to prepare dinner.
I did the backer update myself today, but otherwise didn’t do much to promote the Gourmand Go campaign. Sundays are usually very quiet, I have discovered. We picked up a couple of backers today, bringing us to 123% funded—still about $100 shy of the stretch goal/original target.
Tomorrow we’re into the final 48 hours. I’m confident we’ll hit that stretch goal, but beyond that I have no idea what will happen.
Day 20: 13/11/2023
Back at work. Busy all day. No progress on Gourmand Go overnight, but we started getting pledges in the afternoon and Have seen a steady uptick—about 5% worth—which is great. I hope it continues.
We met the stretch goal to add some additional art by Harry and Dean Rankine and will announce a new stretch goal shortly—a prose short story with an illustration.
Update: up late dealing with a pager alert from work. We’re up to 128% funded now!
Gourmand Go Artist Spotlight
Most folks know Ben Michael Byrne from KRANBURN and NSEW, but I've been following him since the days of his STARK REALITY anthologies. These were 2000AD style SF-horror-comedy shorts, so he was an obvious pick. I knew I had to get him on the book.
Ben is a larger than life personality. If you've met me, invert every idea you have and that's Ben. I'm a skinny, swarthy, quietly spoken Jew; Ben is huge, Teutonic, and... well, let's just say that you know when he's in the room.
I knew Ben would do something wild with the script for his chapter, “Just Desserts”, in which the crew falls afoul of a planetary warlord who is himself a gourmet. But I could not have anticipated how far Ben would push it.
Every prop, every piece of scenery, every bulging vein and popping eye is bigger and crazier than I could have imagined, and this is by far the craziest chapter in the book.
Ben is also a clever bastard with a sly sense of humour. There are a couple of spots in the script where I asked him to draw something impossible. Instead of telling me I’m stupid, he found some absolutely whacky solutions and that really sealed the book with a big, bloody chef’s kiss. MWAH.
Gourmand Going All The Way
I wrote earlier about the original inspiration for Gourmand Go—the short story “To Serve Man” by Damon Knight. But any good story is a fusion of different ingredients and Gourmand Go is no exception.
I often refer to Gourmand Go as “Cannibal Star Trek”, but the truth is I’m not a huge fan. I enjoyed reruns of the original series when I was a kid, but by the time I turned 11 I was reading adult science fiction and Star Trek lost its lustre when you put it next to the work of Simak and Heinlein and Herbert and Spinrad. When I wrote the first Gourmand Go script, one of my instructions was to keep the crew in casual dress so they wouldn’t look like they were part of Starfleet.
A much more powerful influence was the movie Alien. The Ridley Scott original, which I still rate as one of the best science fiction movies ever made as well as one of the best horror films. I particularly like the way it shows a class divide between the command crew of the Nostromo and the blue collar engineers. The Gourmand Go is a tramp freighter and, while the officers like their fine dining, food supplies are a frequent problem on board the ship.
One of the key elements of cannibalism, at least we we usually hear about it in the modern context, is that it’s an act of ultimate desperation. There’s no food and think that a good measure of the horror is not in the act itself, but in the descent into savagery that precedes it. Killing our friends for food. This is what makes Thomas Harris’ famous cannibal-serial killer Hannibal Lecter so compelling: he is refined and educated, not savage. He chooses to eat human flesh because he has superior taste.
And finally, Fitzel, the robot dog. I always loved robot dogs. First Muffit, in the original Battlestar Galactica TV series. I’m not sure I ever actually saw an episode with Muffit in it, but my Dad told me about him and I was so excited by the idea I made him draw me a picture. I don’t recall ever seeing my dad draw… anything else.
And then of course K9 from Doctor Who, a cute robot dog with a deadly laser weapon in his face and no compunction about using it. I read an article about military robots that could be powered by eating corpses and I had all I needed for this character.
That is largely how I arrived at the core of Gourmand Go. A blue collar starship crew, often on travelling on the bones of their arses, trying to stay fed while maintaining their dignity. But don’t feel too sorry for them—they’d eat you without a second thought.
So there you have it. A summary of the campaign to date and the secret inspiration for Gourmand Go. If that sounds like a tasty meal to you, there’s about 24 hours left for you to place your order.
Next time out, the Kickstarter diaries for the end of the campaign, a retrospective, and hopefully a month of rest.
Live wrong and prosper,
— Jason