A bit more than twenty-four hours left on the Chains and Memory Kickstarter. Over the weekend, we went from “might make it to the third stretch goal; might not” to “that’s the third stretch goal sorted; I wonder if we’ll hit the fourth?” Which is, in a word, awesome.

This means that everybody who backs the project will be receiving not two but five rewards: a thank-you in Chains and Memory, “Welcome to Welton” in ebook format, a short story in the Wilders setting, and the soundtracks for both novels. A couple hundred dollars more, and everybody’s copies of Lies and Prophecy will be illustrated to boot!

I’m going to try not to haunt my email today. Your mission, dear readers, should you choose to accept it, is to make that nigh-impossible for me: I still have Kickstarter configured to notify me every time there’s a new pledge, and if they come in at a good clip OH HEY LOOK THERE’S ANOTHER ONE no seriously, I just got another backer while I was typing this — what was I saying? Oh yeah. I would like to be driven to distraction by a steady flow of new pledges. 🙂 Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LJ, Myspace, USEnet, carrier pigeon . . . whatever method you prefer, signal-boosting is a wonderful thing. It’s the last push, and I’m dying to see how far it can go.

Combining these two into one because there’s less of a story behind them than the other two.

Tuckerization is the process of either naming a character after a real person or putting that person into the story as a character (those being not quite the same thing). It is, as you might expect, named after a real person.

In my case, what I’m offering is the use of someone’s name for a character. I’m actually not the sort of writer who bases characters on specific people — at least not mostly. There may end up being a cat in Chains and Memory who is both named and modeled after a friend’s cat, for no better reason than because I was thinking a lot about the book when I knew that friend in grad school, and Hitomi wandered randomly into Kim’s life in my imagination. (Cats, man. Not only do they go where they aren’t supposed you, you can’t even confine them to a single world.) I can’t be specific about which characters yet because I need to see what people end up playing a role in Chains and Memory, but there are a lot of Washington, D.C. types as well as wilders who will be passing through the story, so those are the most likely groups. I’ll be working with anybody who chooses Tuckerization to see what role they prefer out of the available options.

As for t-shirts, there are two options, basically one for each book. The Welton University t-shirt is for Lies and Prophecy, and features a six-pointed star, which is one of the frequent shapes given to the Seal of Solomon in Western occultism. The other is the seal of the Bureau for Special Psychic Affairs, a federal organization that features more heavily in Chains and Memory. The three-pointed star indicates the traditional division of the “psychic sciences” into the telepathic disciplines, telekinetic disciplines, and ceremonial magic. The laurel branches indicate the BSPA copying the look of the FBI seal to give themselves an aura of legitimacy, what with being a relatively new bureau and all. 😛 And the motto . . . ordinarily it would be in Latin or English, but I’d established that Irish Gaelic was (for reasons of folklore and history) adopted as kind of the banner language of magic after First Manifestation, and so I decided to go with that here, too. It says “power, wisdom, restraint” — and yes, I know srian means “restraint” in the sense of a bridle, but that’s deliberate. These are the people who control wilders. And the book is, after all, called Chains and Memory. If the last word of the motto strikes you as a little ominous, you aren’t wrong.

That’s it for the “special” rewards, i.e. the things that aren’t books or progress reports or what have you. Plus there’s the stuff from the stretch goals, of course. Just a few days to go, and then the rewards can start rolling out!