Today has been en emotionally overwhelming day for me already, and I just wanted to drop all you early backers a thank you for helping get this all off to such a good start.

I first had the idea for Things I Learned From Mario's Butt around four years ago, in fact I recently had a FaceBook memory from August 2014 pop up on my feed reminding me about my earliest attempts to make this book a reality. I've spent four years having the desire and ideas to write this book, but lacked the budget to pay the right artist the right money for their work, and the confidence to think a publisher would be willing to stand behind it.

In early 2018, I made a resolution to make this the year I worked on big exciting projects that felt like steps forward for my career, first writing and securing publishing for my memoir, then later getting to work on this book about butts. Getting a publishing deal for my first book really helped give me the confidence this might be doable, and so I pitched the book to Unbound.

Over the past few months, Unbound have been incredibly excited and supportive when it comes to me and this book, providing me the up front resources and staff needed to make this into a real professional product. They handled sorting equipment and a director for my pitch video, sorted all the number crunching, their design teams handled book layout proofs, and they helped me to be able to guarentee my artist a proper rate for the work I wanted them to do. They've really helped me believe this can be a real book, and helped me see what my words are hopefully going to end up becoming.

So, this crowdfunding campaign has been live for maybe two and a half hours at the time of writing, and is already doing pretty well at working towards its target. I'll be using these updates to give progress on the book as it's created as well as behind the scenes looks for those of you who have put money down for a copy, and just want to say a huge thank you for standing behind this silly idea I've always wanted to bring to life.