Well, hello there! How did you come to my office? This place is staggeringly large–some might even say stupefyingly so. Out of all the places you could have been directed to come, of course, you showed up here. “Where is here?” you might ask. Well, “here” is the Celestial Intelligence Agency or CIA as we like to indulgently refer to it around the water cooler. 1 We don’t actually have a water cooler. You wouldn’t know about us yet as the author hasn’t written that book yet. As you can see from the sign on my desk, I am called R. Scholar.2 Not to be confused with RStudio, or R markdown, which this communication just happens to be written in. Rogue markdown? The R, naturally, is a crude stand-in for the rest of my title, if you will, which is, succinctly, Rogue. Put them together, and there you have Rogue Scholar. Add a definitive article, and you will have THE Rogue Scholar, which is how we eccentric spacetime characters like to self-identify and label. You, well, you are here because you are a possible recruit. The thing about recruits is that it is not always easy to know who or what is recruiting or for what purpose–especially by fellows with abstract-sounding titles and definite articles for names. I would positively wince at the mention of someone who was recruiting who insisted, for instance, that his name was “The Boss”.3 Somewhere a solitary snake of clandestine origin weeps tears within a video game console. How cliché!
No, you are here for two basic purposes, which I will delineate.
To partake of, as the colloquial phrase suggests, “sticking it to the man”
Providing funding for a great and glorious work that allows point 1, in the above, to take place.
As The Rogue Scholar I am a character in a world in a dimension which adjoins to your own. As such, in order to exist along with said dimension, all I require is an author to write about me and people to then read what has been written. My needs, parallel to your world, you might say, are simple. I am, quite literally, “sustained by the word” as another Being above my pay grade likes to put it. Naturally, then, I, and the agency, have an interest in making sure the author is taken care of and is able to speak and function in such a way that he is in peak form. I do not know if you are aware of it, recruit, but the publishing and record worlds of your dimension are a mess to put it lightly. Contracts are spun that create merchandising and various other rights that place money in the pockets of those who are not the author in large percentages. Most authors or artists are encouraged to sign these binding agreements which effectively gives the control to people who are NOT the artist or author. Some say there is even a nefarious other nightmare agency that goes by some very familiar initials that try to control who can write what by controlling the REACH of a given author. The audacity! Controlling the reach of the CELESTIAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY! Can you imagine?
The author, though, well, he all ready wrote the first novel about me in 2010 and lacking a clear place to do what is being here outlined, waited until later and made use of the blockchain publishing ability to place the work for the public to read it and also to be able to support it.4 And now of course, you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting something titled The Rogue Scholar. Pshaw! The title of this first novel I am rather fond of as it is called “The Rogue Scholar: The Rogue to Victory”.
The next work, entitled “The Celestial Intelligence Agency” tentatively, needs some bank rolling. This will then accomplish Step 1 which as you will recall is “sticking it to the man” where the man is defined as “all those folks who make artists sign away their lives so they have exposure”.5 These meetings frequently feature a crossroads and a certain “deal”. Business cards usually read ‘Mr. D. Evil’.
So, what I’m asking you to do, recruit, is to consider signing up with the agency and to donate some money. Now, I know you might say to yourself, “Hey, why am I paying this guy to write?” You aren’t. You are paying “this guy” to live. Writing is just something he does. You can find the work for free in a couple places. The first place is here: Publish0x. The copy there is rougher and not as polished, however. This is by design. Another place of crypto support is over at Stacker News. You can see Chapter 1 there if you like. The copy there is less rough, more refined. Both places accept crypto donations.
The tangible benefit of signing is that you get new creativity bootstrapped viz. “The Celestial Intelligence Agency”, which makes it a doable priority instead of scurrying about for government cheese, and should sales of that book prove high enough, future books would be free other than say physical production costs. Hence, the “advance” is crowdsourced to all of you who believe in The Agency and its mission.
Typically, a new writer who is unknown can expect an advance of anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. The author in consideration is not what the internet once termed a “noob”.6 This is from when Great Grandpa played Counterstrike on a LAN by using CD key generators and moonshine bootleg copies back in the Roaring 90’s He has written and published other works. So, a reasonable compromise and funding goal is say, $10,000. That works out to around $1,000 per month for ten months which ought to be enough time to write a decent enough book!7 Unless groceries keep going up. Then one will need at least one oil well.
At the moment, the crypto world offers the ability for support through lightening such as at Stacker News. If you feel especially motivated, you could send Bitcoin to ethernewscoin22.zil which OUGHT to allow those valuable bits to fly into the author’s wallet. Liberapay is an option as the button should appear below this section. Later on down the road, a good ole-fashioned Givesendgo will probably appear.8 As it was spoken, so it was done. Remember, in sticking it to the man, one has to be flexible.9 The man though, he isn’t too flexible. He fails yoga.
Ye Olde GiveSendGo.
Ye New Geyser.
After some text wrangling and editing, the physical book is available for purchase. For reasons that are a mystery (even to a Rogue) the smaller print format is more expensive than the larger print format.
You can purchase the larger print format here. The dimensions on it are 5.5 inches by 8.5 inches.
As other formats become available, they will be listed here.
No. No, I can’t. You are just going to have to trust that it will be worth funding, or by not contributing, you will be voting with your digital money/physical tokens. If you think that will be enough to keep the author from writing the work, you will be wrong. It just might take him longer.10 He gets cranky when things take him longer. Wouldn’t you rather just do something cool, and be a recruit?