Let your children grow up to become farmers. There is a surplus of mediocrity in this nation and a deficit of bravery. Let your children grow up to be farmers. Let them be brave.
Jenna Woginrich is one of my favorite bloggers. She's a woman who was in the urban corporate rat-race until she apparently decided that she would much rather own her own farm, instead -- and that's been the focus of her life ever since. She does own her own farm now -- or at least she's paying a mortgage on her own farm, and she's been documenting all the various joys, discoveries, heartbreaks, thrills, and fears of such a life.
One of the more difficult things she writes about is her constantly troubled financial state, as she tries to make her relentlessly monthly payments while doing a job (as well as freelance writing) that is notorious for not paying much. Woginrich is very creative and crafty in this regard, inventing revenue streams out of whole cloth, and her latest one is a Kickstarter campaign whose main focus is a fiction book she has decided to write.
Cold Antler Farm is a small, livestock farm set into the side of a mountain in upstate New York. It is the home of author, blogger, and homesteader, Jenna Woginrich. There she runs the farm by herself, following her dream of a creative and feral life. Every day Jenna takes care of sheep, horses, dairy goats, pigs, poultry, gardens and bees while writing about it on her blog - Cold Antler Farm. Thousands of readers and hundreds of visitors have been a part of her story, reading along as she went from a corporate graphic designer with farm dreams to a full-time writer on her own piece of land.
Woginrich will write about her rural county in the early 1900's and the strange occurrences happening in the farmland around it. Birchthorn is a mystery and paranormal thriller. A widow and her small farm in the winter, her community of eccentrics and farmers alike, and the strange resurgance of an old legend coming back to life in a small town. And the best part about this story? YOU can be a part of it. Part of its creation process through an interactive blog where you get each chapter as it is written to comment and suggest storyline with, or you can pledge your way INTO the novel itself as a character!
The project has already received full funding, but it's still open for donations for a few more days (and I plan to donate myself before it ends). Woginrich isn't just doing the "Give me money and when the book's done you get a copy or a really nice copy or a really REALLY nice copy with an autograph" thing; she's actually inviting her benefactors into her creative process, which is something that intrigues me greatly. Her book won't just be crowd-funded, but in a sense, crowd-created. I'm highly intrigued to see how this works and what kind of book emerges on the other end. If any of this interests you, do check out her blog! (She has also written a number of books about her experiences with farming and the do-it-yourself life, which are well worth checking out.)
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