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Introduction

Why? Why did I decide to start a Kickstarter? I have no idea. I was sitting on a porch overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on the island of Saint Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was Christmas Day, 2021. Sitting alone, while my family was at the beach, I was thinking through all sorts of things, wandering across the internet.

My last two books were written about non-fiction topics that I knew a lot about. But I don't actually enjoy non-fiction, reading or writing it. So I figured I needed a boost, a kick in the pants, to get me back to writing fiction. Fiction which I hadn't written in any consistent manner since high school. I graduated high school in 2006.

Looking at my past work, deadlines and external motivation are great at getting me to do things. So by having people put money, and me committing to a deadline publicly, really excited me.

So I created the kickstarter, and in less than three days, I had enough folks commit that I hit my arbitrary goal of $500. Now I had to write it.

What is locative.garden

Definition of locative1:

of, relating to, or being a grammatical case that denotes the place where someone or something is present or the place where an event occurs

Definition of garden2:

a plot of ground where herbs, fruits, flowers, or vegetables are cultivated

Who is Nat Welch

Original Kickstarter Announcement

My name is Nathaniel “Nat” Welch. I also regularly go by icco throughout the internet. I have written two nonfiction books, Real World SRE3 & Reliable Web Servers with Go4. Today I am writing a collection of short stories to share with you.

In 2017, Kickstarter launched the Make 100 program and I have wanted to participate ever since. I never launched my first two ideas, both pieces of software. One for playing the game Tak on your phone, and one for evolving how we use Chrome’s Report URI. Both are software I still would like to finish, but for various reasons, I decided not to publish either project.

I’ve been writing open source software since 2001. It was that year I attended my first Linux Users Group (NBLUG), installed Linux for the first time, joined #nblug on Freenode, and fell in love with the idea of digital communities. Before that I had been apart of video game forums, various clubs, etc, but I had never felt a connection between the community and the real world. NBLUG changed that. I met people who made Linux their livelihood, people who helped others for free, people who exchanged books, ideas and jokes both in real life and digitally. Everyone had a connection to the North Bay Area somehow, and I learned so much.

Once I graduated from college in 2011, I started using my money to travel and be apart of digital communities in a physical way. I attended meetups, spoke at Conferences, and traveled a lot. I wanted to gather and share as much information as I could. I eventually found two communities which I deeply love: The Recurse Center and merveilles.town. Over the years my involvement has churned from active involvement, lurking, or actively ignoring. But over the last few years, they continue to be the two communities that I feel closest.

Both of these communities have taught me that art, technology, nature and location are deeply intertwined, and because of that, I decided in 2022 I would take my notes, short stories, doodles and photographs and publish them as a small book to share back what I’ve learned from these and other communities about location.

Footnotes

  1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/locative retrieved on 2022-01-09 ↩

  2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/garden retrieved on 2022-01-09 ↩

  3. My first book, published by Packt. See https://realworldsre.com. ↩

  4. My second book, published by Newline and co-written with Steve Mcarthy. See https://reliableweb.dev. ↩