Uncategorized

Other Fundraiser Awesomeness

/

I know I spent most of last month pushing the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation Fundraiser, but there are two other fundraisers going on right now that I wanted to draw attention to, if only so you’ll understand why I’m going to be on YouTube in a purple cloak reading really bad fantasy…

1. Pat Rothfuss’ Worldbuilders fundraiser. Pat is a fundraising machine, and every year puts together an outrageous number of prizes and rewards for Heifer International. Heifer helps people raise themselves up out of poverty and starvation, promotes education, sustainable agriculture, and local industry all over the world. One of his latest posts listed “Geekery for Gamers” rewards, including the chance to play True Dungeon at GenCon with Pat, myself, Mary Robinette Kowal, and a few other awesome people to be named later. It’s possible there may be some signed copies of Libriomancer showing up in the rewards pile soon, too…

2. Sequence Jay Lake’s Cancer. Jay is an award-winning SF/F author who has been battling cancer for more than four years now. He’s running out of treatment options. One possibility is to genetically sequence his tumor to see if that suggests other possible ways to fight back. Unfortunately, the cost is between $10K and $20K. So Catherine Shaffer and Mary Kowal decided to do a rather creative fundraiser, and persuaded various SF/F folks to do whimsical things at different reward levels.

They raised more than $20K in the first 6 hours. For my act of whimsy, which was the $6000 goal, I’ll be reading from my very first–and very bad–novel, a 50,000 word story about my D&D character Nakor the Purple. And I’ll be doing it IN COSTUME AS NAKOR! I warn you now that it will be painful, so when I post the video online, please remember that nobody’s making you watch, and if you choose to watch, you can’t hold me responsible for the consequences.

Catherine and Mary are adding more goals, and any additional money raised will go to help Jay’s other medical expenses.

#

While the SF/F community isn’t perfect, and we certainly have our problems, sometimes we are pretty damn awesome.