30 Day Countdown Kickstarter

Let the countdown begin! I am submitting my draft for structural editing on February 8th. After 5 years of work, and about 20,000 pages of research (that's about 1,000 pages per chapter, plus or minus), and almost exactly 15 years of thought, starting when I was 17.

Read the introduction to the book here.

Because I am typesetting the project myself in latex, I am also trying to clean up tables, citations, mock-up figure captions, physical symbols and equations myself before I hand it over. Done a final edit over most of the manuscript, I am substantially reorganizing one chapter, and I have one chapter to substantially write (yeah, I am putting off to the last minute).

For this 30-day countdown I am celebrating with a book presale drive / kickstarter campaign. 100% of the proceeds will go to funding illustrations.

After seeing this mock-up (or Mach-up) of Ernst Mach, I knew Matt Schmidt would be a perfect choice to execute the many illustrations for my first book. I want something hand-sketched and beautiful, with a high level of contrast on the page. Matt also appears to work quickly and confidently, and is excited about the project. Here, he seems to capture that Mach is a "villain" in the book!

Matt also began quickly mocking up other images for the book, although these will need some revision and refinement. More important was to start to establish a shading style.

Matt has a lot to work with; I have been sketching out mock-ups of many of the illustrations in the book. Many of them I myself did for Mills' book, years ago. Some will require me to use my 3D modeling skills to create complex cut-away sections of experimental apparatus for Matt to draw over. My goal will be to do as much as possible before he puts pen to paper.

If you are interested in supporting this project, visit my kickstarter page!

best,

Brett