The Backstory of Nicki and Ricky, Part 3

Hi again, everyone!

Well, we’re coming to the end of our special three-part Nicki and Ricky retrospective expose – and to the end of our 30-Day Crowdfundr campaign! If you’ve been planning to pledge your support and/or buy our Nicki and Ricky nature comic trilogy as e-books, paperbacks, or even a three-in-one Hardcover volume (freshly UNLOCKED, thanks to you!), there’s only TWO DAYS LEFT to make your contribution count toward our Final Campaign Total!

In fact, if you click now, here, you can get the entire Nicki and Ricky 3-E-Book Bundle for the super-reduced wrap-up price of only $15!

And, please don’t forget our perks! For the next two days, you still have a chance to Be A Character in either Book 2: The Hummingbird Conundrum or Book 3: The Case of the Duck’s Teeth! Not to mention the opportunity to turn your Summer Science Investigators’ Society Worksheets into a REAL COMIC BOOK! Purchase this perk in the next two days, then send us your finished pages on your schedule – whenever you feel they’re ready. After purchase, there’s no deadline!

So, fellow science sleuths, what do you say? Can we break $2,000 before the campaign ends? As of this posting, we’re only $3 away…!

Yep, that much!

Anyway, let’s see… Last time, on Zero to Crowdfunded: The Backstory of Nicki and Ricky, PART 2, I shared my fortune cookie fortune and the new Aziraphale doll I crocheted, and we made our Hardcover Stretch Goal!!! Astounding! Miraculous! Seriously, you are all amazing. YAY!!! 😊

Now, with only two days left in our Baffling Birds! campaign, $3 left to reach a $2,000 Campaign Total, and $503 left if we’re to meet our $2,500 Holiday Stretch Goal, here’s Zero to Crowdfunded: The Backstory of Nicki and Ricky, PART 3 – the crusty heel of this backstage baguette that dares to ask: how do Rowena and Sarah work together on their projects if there’s a whole continent stretched between them – including some very rocky mountains!

The internet. It’s the internet. Zoom, screen-share, Google Drive, e-mail: all sorts of useful internetty tools that make challenging terrain and vast physical distance somewhat irrelevant to our process. See, Vint Cerf is often credited as the “Father of the Internet,” but he worked with a co-designer, Robert Kahn, which instead of kicking off an essay on the internet’s beginnings, brings us neatly back to the power of collaborating!

Nicki and Ricky began as an experiment: a playful testing ground where Sarah and I could stretch and exercise our creative skills. Preparing our Crowdfundr campaign forced us to evolve our project like a Pokémon – to level it up into something real and solid and, hopefully, useful.

From the start, the Scientific Method was baked into the foundations of our Nicki and Ricky adventures. Now, we brought it to the forefront, mixed in a dash of story structure, and began developing our Summer Science Investigators’ Society Worksheets. The idea was to offer potential subscribers something free, something fun – something that could guide them and their kids through the process of finding, investigating, and solving their own summer science mysteries, just like Nicki and Ricky!

And, it seemed to work! We went from wistful hopes to over a hundred subscribers within weeks of launching our Summer Science Investigators’ Society Newsletter! Each week, we posted fresh new worksheets on our Baffling Birds website, letting Nicki and Ricky explain and demonstrate each step, then providing blank templates with suggestions and further instructions so kids could follow along and create their own comic.

As we did, we also worked to revise our original Nicki and Ricky adventures, imbuing our sibling sleuths with a bit of our own working dynamic. Ricky took on a few of my more autistic traits – super-focused, detail-oriented, literal-minded, and somewhat obsessive. Nicki became more ADHD, like Sarah – impulsive, distractable, hopping from thing to curious thing. But, while they might have seemingly opposing styles, in practice Nicki and Ricky click together like puzzle pieces, each providing what the other needs as they work together to solve each mystery: focus, drive, flexibility, an ability to see the big picture, and a willingness to take that impulsive leap when necessary.

Just like me and Sarah, and our measured, thoughtful, impetuous, wildly experimental foray into crowdfunding this project. We can’t thank you enough for your help making our Baffling Birds! campaign a real, live success! By supporting our big experiment, you’re making it possible for us to bring Nicki and Ricky to kids’ bookshelves and bedside tables all around the world, and that’s a result we can all be proud of. You truly are our heroes!

Two days and $3 to go! Will you be the one to help our campaign break $2,000?

Thanks so much, everybody! And be sure to stay tuned next week for a follow-up podcast about our campaign, where we’ll be interviewed by Barney Smith of Storycomic!