Last spring, I had this crazy idea that I could write a dozen novels in a year. I spent much of my summer chatting with friends about it and hoping that one of them would do the right thing and talk me down from that ledge. Instead, as I explained it in greater detail, they lined up to either encourage me to jump or to push me off.<\/p>\n

Maybe they just wanted to watch the show, which was guaranteed to be a fantastic stunt or a total car wreck, complete with blazing tires flying into the helpless crowd. Either way, it worked.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a fast writer, and I\u2019ve been at it full-time for a long time: twenty-three years this summer. When I\u2019m on a writing roll, I can knock out 5,000 words in a day without too much sweat. Tackling a novel the size of a National Novel Writing Month book \u2014\u00a0about 50,000 words \u2014 then should only take me about 10 days, right? That\u2019s short compared to most novels these days, which often clock in around 80,000 to 100,000 words, but it still qualifies as a novel by just about any major award committee, for which the cutoff is usually 40,000 words.<\/p>\n

So, technically I could do it. The trouble was I couldn\u2019t afford to just take off a year to write a dozen books, as much fun as that might sound. I\u2019m the father of five kids, including a set of quadruplets, and my wife\u2019s salary as a school social worker alone can\u2019t cover our bills. It seemed my insane dream might be grounded on account of finances, but then Kickstarter came along.<\/p>\n