Welcome

My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Thanking 2015's Donors



Pretty much all of W.A.W.'s meager income (running at a about two dollars an hour for the work I do) comes from donation from my generous readers. I discontinued generic Google ads a few months back after I noticed that no matter how many sleazy ones I blocked, more would take their place. So now it's really totally my donors who make this rocket get off the launch pad.

That's you all.

Even though I can't ever thank you enough, I wanted to make sure everybody got one last call out before we head into 2016.

2015 saw more small donors than last year but not as many as 2013 (I got a lot of small donations after Creepy Guy); however, it has also seen a growth in a few people who are simply blowing me away with their epic generosity. Larger donations and ongoing donations have both nearly doubled (even though this year was a lot of jazz hands). When I started, I thought for sure I would be dealing with lots of small donations but it turns out that nearly half of what we make here at W.A.W. comes from about half a dozen people.

Because of all of you, I have to work fewer hours at both teaching and as a househusband to meet some of my expenses. Two years I was able to go from two classes a week to one. Last year I was able to hire a professional cleaner to come in once a month and this year they're coming bi-weekly. This cuts my househusband hours way down.  We also have some sitting help with watching The Contrarian for a couple of hours on some of my longer days. All of that is going straight into more writing time.

Perhaps the biggest news on that front is that this summer, I won't have to divide myself between househusband and summer school. The summer school gig is a cushy one, and it's hard for teachers to get summer teaching gigs, so even though my kids drive me nuts and by the end of the six weeks I'm ready to burn the school down, I'm going to keep it. However, my usual mental split where I'm coming home and tagging in to do a few hours of toddler wrangling after a day of teaching, and then spend Friday, Saturday, and part of Sunday weeping uncontrollably isn't going to happen this year. You gave me the opportunity to drop summer school through donations. I just chose to drop everything else instead since summer school is a cherry gig.

Please don't forget that 10% of every penny Writing About Writing makes goes to my local library earmarked for local Children's Literacy programs*.

*Our current beneficiary

The long term goals of W.A.W., should things continue to grow, are roughly the same. (I mean besides the groupie threesomes, of course.) Eventually I hope to farm out more housekeeping so I can focus more time on writing. (I'm at about as much little kid time as I think I can handle.) That will give me more time for better quality posts, and make my offerings of fiction a much more frequent possibility. After that, I'll look into hiring someone to give my posts a professional editing sweep.

So without further ado, allow me to thank my wonderful and generous patrons. If you've given to Writing About Writing in the last year, and you don't see your name, please let me know, and I will gladly make an edit. I've spent the last four days digging through my e-mail archives and going crosseyed. Gmail has a tendency to "bundle" emails from the same recipient together if they come in within a certain amount of time, so I certainly may have missed a name.

Many have donated money, some have donated time and energy to help improve blog. (Editing help, art, guest blogging, and in a couple of "meatspace" friends cases, helping me out with a few hours of housework so that I could get back upstairs and keep writing.)

Rachel
Nichole
Matt
Mary
Simone
Melissa
Sarah
Riley
Joe
Kent
Sarah
Donald
Katherine
Cathy
Nancy
Zepher
Michael
Nickayla
Jennifer
Anna


Special Thanks
For much larger donations, setting up ongoing automatic payments (of any size), large donations of time and energy, or the donation of highly specialized skills. Also the guest bloggers who have joined the crew and decided to defer their pay back to the blog.

Sarah
LeeAnn
Amanda
Janet
Anonymous
Claire Youmans
Bethany Brengan


Patron Muses
The Patron Muses are the most generous, the most supportive, the most unbelievable. Their generosity actually shocks me in a palpable way. Some have dug deep and donated very large amounts, set up auto-pay donations that make my eyes pop...every month, they have donated hundreds of hours of time and energy helping me to edit, have supported me since the very first days of W.A.W., have helped me proliferate to perhaps tens of thousands on social media by sharing and liking posts, have used Google analytics credit to help W.A.W. place some ads, and have even shown up to conventions wearing homemade Writing About Writing T-shirts. In many cases, they've done more than one thing on this list and maybe a thing or two I'm leaving out because I'm a classy dude who doesn't talk about my sexploits, and every single one of them has, without the slightest hyperbole or poetic license, kept me going when all I wanted to do was put the blog on hiatus and take a fortnight off.

Laura
MaryAnn Stark
Kelly
Terra
Gillian
Tracesea
Amy
Ginger
Anna
Plymoth
Lydia

You are all–ALL of you–breathtaking, amazing, and wonderful. And there might be invisible ninjas cutting onions all around me whenever I think of any of you for too long. There is no way I can thank you enough. I shall keep writing and hopefully keep entertaining you.

We will be making a donation to Oakland Reads from this year's donations shortly. I won't tell you exactly how much it is (because then you'd just be able to multiply by ten and figure out our finances), but suffice to day that we will probably be able to cover at least one class or top off a couple.

Again, if your name is missing from this list, please contact me and I'll fix it right away. G-mail sometimes "stacks" multiple donations into a single e-mail notification when Paypal sends me two notifications in a short period of time, and I don't always notice the e-mail "underneath."

No comments:

Post a Comment