The Kickstarter Diaries, Part 4: The Desperate Optimism of Poor Eyesight

 

The fourth entry in my diary of life behind the scenes in a Kickstarter campaign. The attacks by the bots have subsided, and we are finally down to the serious business of fundraising. Though even that is not as straightforward as it might look—and I use the word “look” with good reason.  

Now read on…

My close-up vision, which has held up remarkably well for lo these 72 years, is finally starting to deteriorate.

During the nine months of writing my latest book By Hand, I could feel it getting worse—not a comment on the book, as far as I know, or the fact that I was writing by hand, just a coincidence of natural processes.

James Thurber, the humourist, pointed out that having declining eyesight creates the opportunity to see the world in new and sometimes surprising ways. He told the story (and drew the cartoon, if I remember correctly) of seeing a small girl in an enormous hat approaching him on the sidewalk, looking for all the world like a gigantic fried egg.

During a Kickstarter campaign, the focus (a word I use advisedly) is on numbers, specifically the green numbers of the Total So Far on the campaign’s home page.

I was about to write “large green numbers,” but as we shall see, they are not large enough for me, or for any person who has not yet reached their goal. We peer at the total so desperately hoping for the best that those fixed sans-serif numerals, which in truth could not be plainer, respond by starting to lose their ancient outlines and take on the forms we want to see.

This happened over and over again yesterday, when the total remained shipwrecked and marooned for an uncomfortably long time on 1,180.

(My laptop, eager to please, translates the dollar total into pounds, as if to help me with the transition from Burlington, Vermont, to Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. Pity it doesn’t do the same thing with inches to centimeters, or pounds to kilograms, where I really need the help.)

As the long day wore on, and I switched abruptly from my email screen (quickly filling up with begging letters from crowdfunding companies wanting my business, and begging letters from me, asking for your pledges) to the Kickstarter home page, hoping to catch it off guard, that number began to waver, like a long straight road in a heat haze.

In that critical first second, when my aging eyes were trying to keep up with the switch of screen, 1,180 became 1,188, then 1,800, then 1,880. Every time I fell for it, leaned forward and peered more closely. Every time the total leaned back into focus as if to mock me. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

Last night at maybe 2 in the morning I woke up, rolled onto one elbow, opened my laptop, felt around for the fingertip pad (biometric security never sleeps) and squinted against the sudden brightness of the screen.

There it was. The midnight miracle: 11880. Or was it even 118800? Surely not! Finally, the world understands what I am trying to do, and has beaten a path to the door of my Kickstarter. Next, the invitation to the Palace. The Nobel Prize.

I screwed up my eyes and looked again. The green figures shrank, in every sense: 1,180.

I closed the laptop, lay back, shut my eyes and fell back into a dream, where everything, at last, is in focus.

 

You can support my current campaign—and in fact I hope you do—by clicking HERE.