Fame? WTF?, New Pickup Line, My First Festival, The Next Book is Not a Book, Speaking

I strive for the limelight, no secret there.  But I’ve never achieved fame, and probably never will.  Unless I reconsider something about the idea of “fame”.

Writing the book lead to a newspaper blurb (small one), and then to a TV interview on KSN News (and a radio station wanting to do a bit on the book too I guess.)  To me, that’s pretty tame stuff.  But I’ve got a bit of a warped perspective – to me, most of this stuff isn’t that difficult to happen. Writing a book isn’t THAT hard, and getting PR is really a matter of connections and / or boldness.

Just as the festival begins, the weirdness starts.  One of ’em was on Facebook – an old classmate comments about wanting my autograph.  Now, to me I make the assumption that she’s picking on me – you ask famous people for autographs, and I call her a smartass 🙂

We ended up chatting a bit about it later, and she honestly wanted my autograph. How odd.

Friday night I chat with a guy from RokICT (more on that in a bit) who was on Twitter but didn’t know who I was (which has become kind of odd, since my hat proceeds me in the WichiTweeps group.  People know who I am before I’ve met ’em.) We exchange account names, and I add him later.  He comments “I didn’t realize I was talking to a local celebrity.”  Of which I explained I’m not a local celebrity.  Didn’t think much more about it – I’ve got other things on my plate, and no real time for reflection for two days because of the signing and the festival.  But again… strange.

Three or four other little things like this happen over the weekend.  I would just correct people to the effect of “I’m not famous” and just chalk it up to weirdness.

Then another facebook comment comes up: “oh my god you haven’t changed at all.Sorry I can’t be there for the book signing,but please save me a copy ok.I liked your interview. I know someone famous COOL!!”

My response: “No problem, it wasn’t mandatory attendance 😉 And I’m not sure I qualify as “famous” :-)”

Becky then popped in a comment that suddenly put all of this in perspective for me:  “Davis, suck it up and face reality, you’re famous because we know you and we can say we know a famous person in KANSAS!!!!! OKAY? DEAL WITH IT hee heee heeeeeeee”

Huh?  Oh shit, now I get it!  I had never considered the idea that people can end up with that “famous” tag slapped on them (even though it’s only applicable for a small group of people) simply because people would LIKE to know someone famous.  What an odd thing.  Nothing wrong with it I suppose.  But now 38 people I went to school with “know someone famous” because some of them have chosen to elevate me a bit. 

If I quit now, I suppose it would fade quickly.  But I’ve only begun to media whore, so I’m curious how far out that sort of thinking begins to apply.

So, I’m having this chat with a early forty-somethings gal who’s a bit interested in me, and we’re talking about the Festival after the festival closed for the night on Friday.  I’m not really this interested in the gal, but I’ve got a beer in my hand and I can’t leave the “beer garden” with it, so chatting is the only option (well, the only socially acceptable option. I COULD have said “Will you please shut the fuck up, I’m enjoying a beer here, and it’s my only beer for the night, so I’m gonna damned well enjoy the son of a bitch. Thank you.”  But it’s not socially acceptable most of the time to do so.)

So she asks what my involvement with the festival is, and I explain that I’m one of the Fountain Street Productions people who arrange the festival. Oh, and I have a book signing on Saturday for my first book.

She suddenly leans in, puts her elbow on her knee and rest her chin on her hand “Ooooh, I knew there was a reason I liked you!”

Before that she was checking me out, but her whole demeanor changed after that one comment.  Suddenly I was Prime Rib.  We’re talking CREEPY levels of interested.

Note to self – careful who you mention the book to.  If she’s the slightest bit creepy to start with, DO NOT MENTION THE BOOK.

So the first Fountain Street Productions created festival has come an gone.  I’ve never been involved in anything quite like this before.  There are only 5 people in Fountain Street – Me (web / tech guy), Jason (founder & management), Mark “The Shark” Shelton (musician, head of Manilla Road, and the musical marketing for the site), Richard (of Great Plains Ren Faire fame – posters, festival planning), and Derek (good connections in the art scene, and general fill in guy where needed.)  

With such a small team, I knew cross communication would probably be good, but there just wouldn’t be any way to cover all the bases.   This thing would be chaos.

Honestly, it wasn’t nearly what I expected.  There wasn’t much in the way of problems.  It actually went extremely smooth!

At the beginning we had invited our “competition” in Wichita to join us (both groups have different focuses, but RokICT views us as their competition because they need to win lots of local mindshare so they can sell ads on their website.  No, not kidding.  People are STILL founding business on the idea of selling ads – oddly enough, the only ads they have up at the moment are for their own events!)  They said the “Respectfully declined” and they didn’t “want their brand associated with an event like this.”

Funny – the minute the festival started looking successful (on Friday night, our “soft kickoff” night, which WASN’T supposed to be that busy!!!) they show up and start handing out fliers and selling people on their new “First Friday” event (funny – Wichita has had Final Friday for ages, but now RokICT wants to sort of steal from that.  Not gonna go over well with the art community that founded it 🙂  So they’re too good to be involved, but but we’re good enough they want to use it as a launch board for their own projects 🙂

I didn’t sell a ton of books, though it was a bit odd how it worked.  I screwed up and put myself too far off the path of traffic, so I didn’t have tons of traffic.  But on Friday, before the signing was scheduled, I actually had strangers trying to find me just to get a copy of the book.  The Eagle had mentioned the book… and never provided any link to the site. *SIGH* Thanks for the press, but just adding ONE MORE LINE would have done so much more for me.  Oh well 🙂

I also didn’t spend nearly as much time parked in my booth as I had expected – there were always little things that could use an extra hand to get done, so I’d head over and help out then come back.  Pointing out where an Artist needed to set up, things like that.  Just little stuff, but it kept me hopping.

And the music… wow.  Everyone rocked.  At one point I got up from my booth just to find out what some guy was playing, because the sound was so unique.  Everything was like that.  I was completely amazed.

The festival was a hit.  It was amazing how much traffic there was through the festival in general.

And we’ll be doing it again in the June / July range 🙂

So one night I have insomnia bad.  And something clicked.  I had been looking through some old files, and ran across some of my data for The Horror Game.  That was about a week ago.

Well, the core book for The Horror Game is almost done now.  Not sure how the hell I’ll market this one, but I love the introduction and the first chapter of it.  I found some sort of middle ground between the usual “tech speak” sort of thing that happens with most Gaming books, and a sense of humor.  

As soon as I’m finished (this week? Next week?  Three months from now? Who knows) I’ll send out a link for everyone.  Though I’m thinking about doing it like I did The Story of Gamer Zone where I post sections online for people to preview, and be able to purchase “Read Ahead” accounts where you can read what’s in the queue.  That was a fun and motivating way of doing it, and I did make a couple bucks off of it (I suppose though I didn’t really make enough to really merit the extra bit of effort. Grand total, I only sold $20 in $5 Read Ahead accounts.)  If I go ahead and start posting bits, I’ll be sure to mention it.

Not sure if I ever posted this on here, but I also have my first “speaking engagement” since IGC ’03.  Speaking to a college class at Butler on digital businesses.  An activity I wouldn’t mind getting used to 🙂 (Though I won’t – it will probably be another 6 years before someone asks me to speak again. 😉