This weekend was my Drakeathon: an 8-hour livewriting marathon over two days to raise funds to help offset the costs of my diabetic kitty’s insulin, needles, and vet visits.
For 4 hours on Saturday & 4 on Sunday, I took prompts and wrote from them in a GoogleDoc open to anyone who donated.
I received $155 in donations, got 20 prompts from 16 people, 13 of whom donated.
(in sick kitty terms, this is one bottle of insulin and 100 syringes, or 6 visits to the vet, or 155 days of canned cat food).
Things I learned:
* I like livewriting. I really like it. If I could do all my writing in front of an audience, I think I would.
* GoogleDocs works, but it has its flaws. It’s not right there visible to everyone, which I think might draw more interest.
– Clarification 1: It’s not in everyone’s face the way LJ/Twitter are. Having a docslike thing on the webpage would be ideal.
– Clarification 2: the flaws are generally in the word processing features of googledocs.
– Why did I set this up as fake bullets and not real ones?
* (Something I knew already, but I’m not sure how to capitalize on best): Interest makes interest. If half of your Twitter Feed or F-list is talking about something, you’re more likely to be interested yourself.
* 4 hours at a sitting is too long, and midnight is too late.
Things that surprised me:
* I got less unpaid prompts (5, from 3 people) and more paid prompts (the other 15) than I thought I would. I expected a lot more little 50 or 100 word unpaid prompts and less 600+ word paid requests
* I write slower than I thought I would. I still have 2 unpaid & 4 paid requests to write in the next week, totally 3900 words (I wrote ~7000 words over 8 hours).
* People seem rather interested in what sort of pizza I’ll be getting with the $20 incentive level (probably take-out Indian. There’s no good delivery in East Nowhere where we live)
* It probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but I had quite a few Addergoole prompts (4, plus two in the wings that are “Addergoole /or/ Cali;” Addergoole is my webserial I’ve been posting for 2+ years) and none for the current fantasy short story setting, Reiassan.
All in all, I had a lot of fun. I’m excited to put together the e-book, as that will be another learning experience, and I will probably do this again at some point.
* Title changed from “postmortem” to indicate that the kitty in question is still alive and well!
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I think it went well, and you learned a lot (like how fast you write on demand). I don’t know of a livewriting wigit. I would imagine the closest thing might be a box with text (and even less word-processing ability than GoogleDocs). People like to know what they have helped create. So they want to read the stories, and know what kind of pizza you bought. We don’t need many details of Drake’s medical care, but knowing how much we bought him in terms of medical supplies or food is neat. It reassures me that this was a good idea. I’m not surprised about the Addergoole requests. I’m a fan of the Stranded World and Rieassan, but Addergoole is your largest audience. Congrats!
Trix found a livewriting widgit but, yes, it has a bit less functionality than Googledocs. Tradeoffs!
Yeah, you code one or the other. Coding both would be hard (and probably involve a cost). I would imagine a livewriting wigit would have no formatting at all.
It had bold italics underline but it was a bit harder to use than GoogleDocs, which is moving in the wrong direction 🙂