Help Me Write a Gay Romance Novel

My name is Paul and I’m writing my first novel! It’s a gay romance title, but before I get to the project, a little about my qualifications. Writing was my “day job” at Arlington County’s Mobility Lab, where I was a reporter. My focus was on transportation research and technology, and my writing utilized my background in Urban Planning, in which I have a Bachelor’s Degree from UVA. My stories at Mobility Lab were consistently well-read, and several of my stories ranked in the top ten most-read stories of the year, two years in a row. I’m good at “popularizing” and distilling complex technical information into user-relevant data, according to MoLab’s Director; and according to the Arlington bureau chief under whose purview MoLab operated, my ability to develop angles people wanted to read benefited from my highly intuitive nature (intuition was my stand-out trait in a personality test all employees took). Today, I still blog in my spare time, now for Medium, but only personally, i.e. unpaid, not professionally. On Medium I write primarily about consumer technology, and you can check out my writer’s page at the URL www.medium.com/@goddin. Today, I’m writing something completely different: a gay romance, as I said. It’s a much different style of writing compared to both reporting and blogging, and it’s a much longer format, so there are some challenges. My book is a contemporary romance between a college student at UVA and a “townie,” a somewhat formulaic modern take on Romeo and Juliet’s themes. My book will be self published. To prep for this, I read books about how to write and how to self-publish, and I took a Udemy course on how to publish a $10,000 book on Amazon in 72 hours. Both have been invaluable references. Nevertheless, I’ve had a number of false starts — chapters written and thrown out as my concept evolved — but I now have a book outline that’s fairly high level but fairly static, I believe. And I have written the first three chapters, and I’m pretty happy with them. I’m serious about this project; this book will be written. To get my book completed in a reasonable time frame I need to work on it full time. I’m currently unemployed, and have had a hard time finding meaningful employment. While I refocus my search on less career-type jobs (waiting tables for instance) I’m hoping this campaign might catch on instead. And writing this book has been the definition of work that doesn’t feel like work, so fingers crossed. (I’m just mad at myself that I didn’t try this in my 20s.) This campaign would cover, if fully funded at $6,000, my bare minimum expenses for six months, which is what I estimate it will take for me to have completed my book, proofread it and edited it, designed its cover, and published it to Amazon. My goal, again, is $6,000. I have 848 Facebook friends. If every one of my Facebook friends donated $7, I’d hit my goal. Another way to parse it is: if each gift is $50, only 14% of my Facebook friends would need to donate. I like to think that 14% of my friends on Facebook would be able to donate $50 to my campaign without suffering a financial hardship, and that at least 14% of you is can see that this is something I’m passionate and sincere about, and that it is a worthwhile use of my time. Just in case, however, I’m not above bribery. And, so... Everyone funding me will receive an electronic copy of my book, signed by me. They just need to provide their email addresses, or make sure their email addresses in Facebook are up-to-date and that their privacy settings allow me to view it. Thanks for reading, and thanks so VERY much if you choose to support me.