Patrick Rothfuss's Blog, page 24

Over the weekend, Worldbuilders passed $681,000 in donations.

This might seem like an odd benchmark to get excited about. But $681,000 is how much money we raised last year. Passing that is a big deal for us, especially considering that we moved our big event much earlier in the year, and cut the time of the fundraiser in half.

Honestly? I was worried we wouldn’t make it. But we did. In fact, as you can see from our thermometer, we’ve rocketed far past it. As I write this, we are just about to...

On Wednesday afternoon, Worldbuilders crossed the $600,000 mark on our fundraiser.

On Wednesday night, this happened:

(There are some days I almost believe I’m one of the cool kids.)

Then, early yesterday morning, this happened:

Thank you, everyone for donating.

Thank you Neil for being your lovely, generous, kindhearted self.

We’ve got four days left in this year’s fundraiser, where every $10 you donate to Heifer International on our team page gives you the chance to win thousands of cool books an...

We have been getting a lot of messages and comments as we approach the end of the fundraiser, asking what people can do to help out and be involved, so we thought we’d share some ideas with you today:

You can bid on one of the many auctions that are running and get yourself something cool and collectible.

You can also buy cool stuff in the store, where all the proceeds go to Worldbuilders.

Or you can do what 7-year-old Charlotte did.

You have to watch that. Seriously. I demand that you watch it.

C...

We’re winding down here, folks. As of tonight (Tuesday, Dec 9th) all of this year’s auctions are live.

We haven’t talked about all of them yet in the blog, but they’re all posted up on e-bay in all their glory. So if you’d like a sneak peek of some things coming up, there you go.

A lot of stuff in today’s blog. Most of these books are signed, doodled in, and/or rare.

What’s more, we have several books in today’s blog that are Advance Reading Copies of books that won’t be hitting the shelves for...

For those of you who don’t know, I have a little boy. I won’t tell you his name, because his name is his own business. And he’ll share it with the world when he’s ready.

Online, I refer to him as Oot.

He is my heart’s delight. He is my sweet boy.

This is a story about him. Because that’s what I do. I tell stories.

* * *

A while back, I wrote a blog about my change jar.

(Yeah. My kitchen is pretty orange.)

In that long-ago blog, I talked about how strange it is for me to have quarters in my change ja...

So while I was off in Seattle for a quick trip, we hit our 500,000 dollar stretch goal.

Which means this is happening:

Yeah. The delightful Brothers Chaps over at Homestar Runner are going to put together a full-length video of Strong Bad (re)writing and reading that beloved children’s classic, The Ocelot and The Porridge Maiden. I think Hans Christian Anderson wrote the original version of that one late in his life when he was addicted to cough syrup.

Needless to say, this is pretty cool for m...

You all have been going above and beyond, with our total creeping ever closer to the $500,000 mark. In the last day alone we’ve raised more than $75,000. That’s enough to buy biogas stoves for 75 entire villages.

Around 3 billion people in the world still cook and heat their homes using open fires. By buying stoves for the entire village, you’re improving the health of families who would otherwise very likely develop chronic lung and eye diseases from smoke inhalation in poorly ventilated buil...

Here at Worldbuilders, we’ve been known to occasionally engage in some enthusiastic exaggeration. We might sometimes say someone gave us “a ton of books” when in truth, it was a *lot* of books that did not actually weigh 2000 pounds.

But in this particular case, we’re not being hyperbolic. Mayfair Games has literally sent us a truckload of games.

And it wasn’t a little truck either. There were so many games we had to get a forklift to unload it.

So yeah. There are a *lot* of games here. And we’r...

Over the last two weeks, authors, publishers and fans have been sending us box after box of signed books, cool games, and geeky miscellany have been showing up at WB headquarters. So many new items it’s caused a bit of a problem: There’s no way we can show all of it off in the five days remaining in the fundraiser.

It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem.

I talked things over with the Worldbuilders team, and they’ve said they’re willing to put in the extra hours. So we’re going to...

We’re getting closer to the end of the fundraiser, and things are starting to speed up. As I write this, we’re at 383,000 dollars, and we’ve been unlocking new stretch goals at an incredible rate.

If you haven’t been keeping up, you can access them all here:

Remember, if you donate on our main page, you move us toward future stretch goals and have a chance to win all manner of books, games, and other cool things in the lottery.

Cool things like these:

Earlier in...