* Publication Updates *

CGB Pattern and Colouring Books, and CGB Volume III

Hello all, and thank you so much for checking in here for your updates on books, rather than emailing. As soon as the PodCast chapter is finished, we have books! Our third Exploding Set was well worth waiting and working for – it was indeed the missing link for me.

PodCast Bead by Ingrid Wangsvik (without the Circle Start, challenging)
and Irregular Rick-Rack Cast by Kate

It’s a lot of work, though (previous chapters have to be vetted and in some cases reworked to accommodate our new understanding) so please be patient. I’m not sure at what point this summer I will finish.

If you are concerned in the slightest about the delivery date of the printed and bound paper books, I would prefer to refund your pre-order than to participate in that concern; I hope that you understand.

Email kate@katemckinnon at any time for a refund – we’ve got a wait list for pre-order bundles so it’s really no problem.

. . .

How Do Pre-Orders Work at CGB?

If you’d like to know more about how we work, and how pre-order funds fit in, read on. CGB is a huge project, in our eighth year now, and (although you may not know it) I am an unpaid volunteer in the creation of the new books.

Yep. All funding for the work, for computers, beads, and for the travel of team members to our meetings has come from me personally.

The pre-order proceeds only pay for the press run to print those pre-orders; nothing more. That funding is vital to me, though, as it’s very difficult for a working artist to earn and save enough to pull off a $50k press run. I earn my living primarily from sales of books I have written previously, and CGB Volumes I & II have paid for all of this work.

If I act as the publisher as well as the creator, you see, the first press run of a book is enough to launch it; as soon as I am able to print and deliver the pre-orders, I have a living, breathing new book and I can sell it to others. And then those books will feed me until I have a new one.

I always stop pre-orders when I have exactly enough to pay for the first press run, which is why I cut the CGB pre-orders off last year. As you might imagine, even 500 people is a quite a few to answer to.

During 2017, to earn a bit of income to help meet my own expenses while I kept at these new books, I took a commission from the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works to help design a revolutionary technology portfolio.

They found my ideas so shocking (and my life structure of living hand-to-mouth so inexplicable) that in October of last year, they reported me to the Department of Defense and investigated me as a spy.  It was harsh, and disruptive. I’m still getting over it, which is why I’ve been scarce online, why I haven’t written in my personal journal, or been in touch with people not immediately involved in my work.

Apparently the shapes I was making (Hypars, rippling surface skins, and machines of tetras and triangles) and the way I was speaking of them (morphing surfaces, hidden signal, concealed energy potential) sounded a lot like things seen, but not explained, and just like that I was turned, end up, into the awareness of spooks (not nice) and the study of phenomenology, light and quantum propulsion.

Those studies are where I’m headed again as soon as I go to press with these last books on beadwork.

The last chapter of this work, the mystery I was working toward, is the PodCast Bead. It’s so small, and so deceptively simple in appearance, so completely natural. But I’m not surprised, because isn’t everything in Nature born folded? I could never have truly seen and appreciated this form if I had not studied All Of The Things. Even the experience of being interrogated was useful; even being threatened is informative.

As it turns out, everything is just a shape. Some people and structures take the shapes of their fears, and some the shapes of their hopes and their joy.

Also, Nature builds and delivers its new forms folded, furled, or packed. If a plant wants to unfurl a new leaf, it doesn’t send out a string of proteins in a long line and then fill in from the outside to create a leaf, it builds it in miniature, grows it folded, and then unfurls or unrolls it fully functional. Your own DNA and internal workings are densely folded.

We’ve been beading for hundreds of thousands of years. We study Nature. We can work this way too.

If you follow us online, you will know that we’ve been test beading the PodCast, and I have been asking for open participation. Join us?

I greatly appreciate the community support of this project, and all pre-orders will be treated beautifully when we ship. The digital releases (which everyone who supported the project will get) will distribute when we sign the press proofs.

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