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Mary Anne has launched a Kickstarter project for a new book she's writing.

It's called Demimonde. It's going to be a mosaic novel—a set of interlinked short stories—set in the universe of her story “Jump Space.” Humans and aliens at a university, against the backdrop of a coming war.

As many of you know, Mary Anne has written and edited several books, including both erotica and literary fiction. My favorite of her published books so far is Bodies in Motion, which is also a mosaic novel. I had read the majority of the stories in the book in earlier incarnations, but reading them all together, seeing how they intertwingled, understanding how the characters interrelate, seeing events from different points of view, worked really well; good as the individual stories are, the novel is more than the sum of its parts.

Bodies is mostly literary fiction, though it has some sex in it; especially in one of my (several) favorites, “Seven Cups of Water.” But Mary Anne is returning to erotica after a long time away from it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what she'll do with a mosaic novel that's both erotica and science fiction.

. . . A note for those of you unfamiliar with Kickstarter: Kickstarter is a website for funding creative projects. A creator posts about a project; people who are interested in helping fund it sign up to donate to the project; if the project meets its funding goal, then everyone donates and the creator proceeds with the project. If it doesn't meet its goal within the allotted time, then the project is cancelled, and nobody makes donations. As the About page for the site puts it, “it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.”

So if you're interested in seeing Mary Anne's new project happen, stop by her Kickstarter page and sign up to donate. There are prizes for various donation levels.

You can pledge as little or as much as you want. I think one useful way of thinking about it is to think in terms of how much it's worth to you to support this project and Mary Anne's writing.

To put it another way, the Kickstarter model is more like patronage of the arts than like buying a book; you can certainly choose to pledge only the price of a single copy of the book itself, as if you were pre-ordering a copy, but people who donate to Kickstarter projects often pledge more than that, sometimes significantly more. I think the model that people are most familiar with that's similar to Kickstarter is public radio or TV: when you pledge to donate to those, the conceptual model is generally that you're supporting the work that the station does, rather than saying “I have purchased an episode of this TV series for the going per-episode rate.”

But I don't mean this to be a hard sell; if you're interested in the book and want to essentially pre-order a copy, then you can, for example, pledge $10 and you'll get a copy of the ebook version of the book when it comes out.