The Pedal Turns the Crank: Scribble breakthrough!

I’m so excited about this! (I know, everybody says that about their Kickstarter project, but I’ve got the excitement chemicals speeding around my system EVEN AT THIS VERY MOMENT.)

Photo from today’s weekly production meeting for The Pedal Turns the Crank. I love Khai’s rough sketches, but the major conceptual breakthrough? That I’ve been banging my head against for months (for years, if you’re counting since I first had the idea that this could be a picture book)?

The scribbles at lower right. Those are the final breakthrough that had to happen.

This whole book is families having bike adventures together, and each spread (spread = left and right page together as one big rectangle) is one family. There’s the mountain bike family, the road bike family, the beach cruiser family, etc. On the last page, they all come together for a big ride.

But just because a kid has learned the chant (“The pedal turns the…CRANK! The crank turns the…CHAINWHEEL! etc.), that doesn’t mean they know what a chainwheel is, or how to recognize one.

I’ve been going with variations of one basic idea, which is simple technical illustrations as spot art on each spread. Pedal. Crank. Then on the next spread: Crank. Chainwheel.

But I got to thinking about how I taught my own kids. I didn’t do that, I got down low with them and put my finger on each thing. Pedal. Crank. Chainwheel. Chain. Sprocket. So could we do something like that at the very end? Just show everything in that way?

And Khai said, Or the center spread.

And there was the thunderbolt:

The center spread (the one that comes halfway through the book) is in comic book form, a series of panels, each showing one of the different bike families taking a break on their journey and the adult showing the kid one drivetrain part.

So each family’s journey is in three pieces: Their own spread, at the start of their journey; one panel of the center comic spread, taking a break during the journey and learning something; and their little part of the big final image, all the cyclists coming together.

And then, on each main family spread, which says, eg, “The chainwheel turns the…CHAIN!” the chainwheel and the chain are red, or have a little glow, or something like that. It’s a Where’s Waldo, with the center comic spread as its key.

This was the LAST THING that had to fall into place.

I love weekly production meetings, I love collaborators that get you excited every time you meet, and I love this book.

Kickstarter pre-launch page. Please follow us! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/noteon/the-pedal-turns-the-crank

The Pedal Turns the Crank: Kickstarter presskit!

Regular posting about The Pedal Turns the Crank is a goal for me, leading up to the unveiling of the pre-launch Kickstarter page, and I’ve been posting some of Khai’s rough art and writing about the project, but today it occurred to me that I could show how some of the design stuff for the Kickstarter is coming along, too.

After reading an article about how to get on podcasts at Jane Friedman’s website, I started putting together a one-sheet (aka press kit, aka media kit), following the tips in the article. So in the spirit of letting people see how things are going, even if they’re not finished yet, here’s what’s up this week on my end. I haven’t cut Khai’s bio down enough yet, and there’s some gibberish in it which is me typing key thoughts while he talked at Friday’s production meeting, but this will turn into what we send out to try to get the interest of bicycle podcasts, parenting influencers, family podcasts, book influencers, crowdfunding blogs…

I don’t think it’s focused enough yet, as a one-sheet. It’s more like book jacket copy, and I’m not sure how to better focus it, but we’re 1) maintaining momentum 2) consistently 3) in the right direction.

Which if you’re a bike person, you’ll recognize as the only way to get someplace you actually intended to go.

Two stragglers

So first Fat Cyclist called me out, and then I called him out back, and then he missed his story deadline, and then I made my deadline for “The Rambler, Part 2,” and gave him more time and he got “Last Ride on the Kokopelli” done, and then November 30th at midnight, I missed my deadline for getting the whole book together and up for sale.

So…I can’t tell who won anything. I think we both lost—but we also both finished our stories, and I’m about to finish the book. That’s noble and honorable, right? Coming in under your own power after you miss the cutoff?

Here’s the cover:

It still needs its back cover and spine designed, a missing author blurb snagged, ISBNs registered, and some other stuff that somebody’s got to do and I’m the only one here. I tried. Sometimes N+1 is how long it’s going to take to finish a book.

Should be a couple more days or so.

We also never quite got around to agreeing on exactly what would happen if one of us lost, but now that both of us have, it seems to me it should be doubled.

So if we take [never really figured out this bet] and double it, we get…uh…well, I think we get “donate money to each other’s favorite charity.”

What say you, FC?

Acceptance

LAST AUGUST 1, I moved from an apartment in New York City where I lived with my wife and kids to a duplex in Connecticut where I live alone half the time and with my kids half the time. At that same moment, unrelated, I lost about 80% of my income.

So there’s been a lot of stuff to take care of. A lot of it, I didn’t know I’d have to take care of, but I’m the only grownup here, so care of has been taken. Or anyway, mostly taken. I now have my own floor steamer. I have an oil heater. I have a big cheery orange stock pot, a dining nook, a scratched car with a lease I shouldn’t have signed, two Freecycle window boxes of geraniums that face the wrong way on the porch because I don’t care if you can see them, hooks in the kitchen for three bike helmets and a tarp over two little bikes outside, a slow cooker, a roasting pan, a half-sanded Goodwill dresser for my bike clothes, a tiny Japanese clothes washer in my bathroom (with lint catchers and mesh laundry bags and a collection of detergents and stain removers in the cabinet above it, and we, the Snyder boys, who are a family, have a system), and a task grid called SCHOOL MORNINGS AT DAD’S hanging on a clipboard where we can all see it at breakfast. I have sleep deprivation and less hair, I have maybe 40% of my income back, and I usually have yellow flowers in Mason jars or whisky bottles by the kitchen windows.

I threw away all the salad forks. They are not missed. I gave away the microwave oven. It’s not missed either; Snyder boys cook. I got rid of all but the three bowls I thought we’d ever need at one time. That was less smart than the salad forks and the microwave.

I have regrets, deep exhaustion, a body that’s rarely ridden farther than the grocery store since the double-century 18 months ago, a roll-top desk half turned into a charging station, and not a stack, but an occasional discovery of papers from school that I haven’t read. And my floors are better than they were before I bought the steamer, but you don’t step in here and go Wow, this man’s quite the housekeeper!

My kitchen is clean when I need that symbolism more than I need to get somebody’s book designed, or when the boys show up and I want them to think I clean things all the time. It was cleaner during the first six months, when there was less paying work and more need to feel I was taking care of things.

I do take care of things. Not all the things. There sure are a lot of things.

ONE HALF-THING I took care of as I stumbled out one door and into another was I paid all the contributors to RIDE 3. I knew I was going to lose my grip on getting it edited, designed, and published, though I didn’t know for how long, and I didn’t want the weight of not paying people pressing down along with the weight of not having it done yet.

Blog entries, the good ones, are from impulse and urgency. There was one every couple of months. As real writing time came back, in tiny spans, I spent it half-assing the writing that meant the most to me, which was novel #5. It’s been a 14-year gap since novel #4. Then I’d quarter-ass my RIDE 3 story, which not only has a couple of plot things still left to solve, but is in iambic pentameter and has to rhyme.

Then the book will need designing, all the stories need typesetting, the POD has to be set up, the ebook versions have to be made, everything needs uploading, I have to figure out who to send it to for reviews and put together some sort of promo thing and blog it…

Too much.

The contributors checked in every so often. I wrote back and said I’m doing my best, but it’s going to be a while. And I was doing my best. Eighth-assed was my best.

They were nice.

Except one.

FROM ELDEN NELSON, Fatcyclist:

Click it to read the rest. It’s just mean.

Yeah, I know it’s been two days since he called me out. I’ve been busy.

SO two things:

One, I hate when people say I have nothing to apologize for instead of accepting my apology. So—Elden, you’ve got nothing to apologize for, and I accept it anyway.

Two, you’re on.

Four, RIDE 3 will be up at Amazon by December 1, in time for holiday gift-giving that doesn’t just mean “Christmas gift-giving.”

Five, it’ll have my story, The Rambler, in it–either Part 2 of a sufficient length to be clearly not a cheat (Part 1 was in RIDE 2), or the whole thing.

Six, wait til you see these stories…

Seven, okay that was nine things.

Anyone who doesn’t make his deadline has to…donate Some Amount To Be Determined to a charity of the other’s choosing, as well as write a ballad praising the other’s bike prowess and calf and/or butt definition.

IF I DARE? Oh, I dare. Because I know the secret.

Some people think art comes from inspiration.

Some people think it comes from hard work.

But you and I know. True art comes from abject terror of public shaming.

You got six days…tick tock…

Hoyt’s Hill

 

“I DON’T WANT to hear any woohoos. I want to see serious descending.”

He’d just climbed 300 feet over about three-quarters of a mile, and now we were over the crest and he was feeling the start of his reward, rolling T-right onto Spring Hill Road on his little 20″ kids’ bike and aiming it dead-center at gravity.

“ONE,” I’D SAID to him after making him stop with me at the crest. I was holding one finger up. “You’ll have to brake a lot sooner than you usually do. So do it way early, so you don’t shoot into an intersection and get squished by a car. Got it?”

He broke in with something happy and excited about the climb. I nodded and said, “Did you hear what I just told you?”

“Yes…”

“What did I say?”

“You said…”

“…brakes?”

“Oh, right. I have to brake sooner than I think I will.”

“Correct. I’ll help you with that. When I tell you to do something, you have to do it. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“OK, that’s one. Two is, if your bike starts to shimmy, clamp your knees on the top tube.”

“Oh, I do that anyway.” He showed me.

“So clamp, and also slow down. Don’t do it abruptly, or roughly. Nice and easy, controlled. Got it?”

“Got it! Let’s go!”

He was already rolling.

FIRST LEG, HE overshot the stop sign by a couple of feet. A mother on the other side of the intersection, twenty-five feet away, just barely started reflexively pulling her kids aside, but it was mom-protectiveness, no danger, and there were no cars anywhere.

I raised a hand in thanks and smiled, and she did the same.

“He just climbed it for the first time, so now he gets to descend it for the first time,” I said as we started up again from the stop, explaining why I’d been calling out directions.

“Oh, that’s fine,” she said, smiling as we passed, and then it changed to, “Oh, wow!”

We flashed down past a roadie coming up the next grade. He was mashing. We were a kids’ bike whipping downhill and fenders and bags behind it yelling NICE! GOOD JOB! NICE TUCK!

“OH MY GOD!” the kids’ bike shouted at the bottom, as we coasted on a short flat. “THAT WAS SO AMAZING! THAT WAS SO FUN! OH-MY-GOD!”

“Nice job. Left turn coming up. See it? That’s the next descent.”

I saw him searching, saw him find it. “Oh my god. That’s–”

“Stay right,” I said, and we tilted down.

I HAVE LANDMARKS along this hill for braking. Approaching Hoyt’s Hill on Fawn at full tuck and 223 pounds, the white mailbox is too far.

“OKAY!” I yelled. “I WANT YOU TO BRAKE IN THREE…TWO…ONE…BRAKE!”

In a couple of seconds, there was a tiny wobble in his rear wheel. I knew what that was, and I saw him ease off and get back inside it. He wasn’t to the intersection yet. Apprehension got me, as if there was anything I could do if he overshot now.

We put our feet down at the limit line together. This time yesterday, all three of us were out charging around a parking lot in a downpour. This kid’s just like me in a storm—he nearly glows with the thrill. He was very nearly that electric now.

“OH MY GOD, THAT WAS SO AWESOME! How fast do you think we were going? Oh, you don’t know, you weren’t going as fast as I was. Oh my god THAT WAS SO COOL.”

“No, I was right there with you. I’m thinking maybe thirty.”

“THIRTY! OH. MY. GOD!”

“Maybe. Maybe thirty. Maybe mid-twenties. We’ll see when we get back and see what it looks like on Strava.”

“I think it was thirty! Dad, I could hear it in my ears, like–” he imitated the noise.

I grinned and nodded. Now it was something we both knew. Not just me.

“Okay, we’re going to cross and then stay right. … Go.”

TEN AND a half.

Next summer, adolescence. This summer, “I don’t like being home alone. Can I go too?” and a little red bike and a little white jersey in a tuck.

Going 30.6.