Putting Out The (Notional) Guitar Case

As many of you who are regular readers know, I was kind of an early innovator in the realm of crowdfunding. I also regularly record and release my own music, which doesn’t make me a lot of money, but enough to occasionally pay for groceries and that sort of thing. As you probably also know, I’m in the middle of starting what I think is an exciting new Web tool, Stikki. Things are moving along for Stikki, slowly but surely…but it’s the slowly part I wanted to talk to you about today.

Here’s the long and short of it: a couple of days ago, our car died. We haven’t had it towed to a mechanic, but I’m 90% certain that the problem is that the transmission is kaput — specifically, the torque converter. (The car won’t shift out of first gear. It’s not grinding, just chugging, and that’s basically a sign that the TC is cooked.)

This isn’t much of a problem for me, as I work out of my house or the local coffee shops…but it’s a very big problem for Rosalie, who just started a new job on the other side of town. Las Vegas is a southwestern city, which means it’s a sprawl city, so her bus ride would be an hour or more, and our public transportation is both unreliable and franklydangerous for a single young woman. (Almost every dodgy situation I’ve found myself in since I moved to Vegas has occurred while waiting for a bus, and I’m a big scary dude.)

So we need to buy a new car or replace the transmission in ours, which will basically be about the same amount — $2500 or so. (If we buy an older car, I can do the repair and upkeep myself; I’m not a motorhead, but I know what a Chilton’s manual is and I’ve done basic repair work on my own vehicles before.) But at the moment, it seems unlikely that we’ll have that kind of spare money any time soon. (I’ve got one possible project that would handle essentially all of our money problems, but that’s a whole other story. Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.)

Many of you have been willing, in the past, to pay actual cash money for my writing or my music. So here’s what I’d like to throw out here: what can I offer you that you’d be willing to pay a dollar or two for? More music? Fiction? Non-fiction? Some kind of web app? Something that, even if you yourself couldn’t afford to pay for, you’d be willing to share with the world.

I actually want to do something that’s crowdcommissioned, that’s what people want to see, rather than something I come up with myself. It’s an interesting challenge, and knowing you maniacs I’m curious as to what you’d come up with.

So what do you think? Tweet at me or write in the comments here.