Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Welcome to another Thursday update! This week I wanted to take some time and give y’all a deeper dive into my new project, Spatium.
If you remembered, I introduced this project to y’all about a month ago, and I think I mentioned it again a couple of weeks ago.
However, today, I wanted to give y’all the full roadmap for this project and some of my goals in it. I’ve also been sharing this “roadmap” with some other artists and writers to get their opinion too.
I have a lot of visions for the future of this project that extend into late 2022 and beyond. However, we should always start small and build upwards.
Like the old adage, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
None of this is actually set in stone yet so it may change, and your feedback is definitely encouraged! After all, this project is for you guys, so I’d love any feedback on how it should work.
Here is the really quick breakdown of what this project will entail, but don’t worry I’ll cover each piece individually too:
Spatium Stories: monthly short stories available via vaults, minted NFTs, or free on CloutPub (until I can build some momentum)
Spatium Characters NFT Series:
Genesis Series: characters found directly in the different Spatium Stories minted as collectibles
Generative Series: characters randomly generated with a random fiction piece included to give a sense of their personality
Merge Series: a chance to merge any characters (genesis or generative) together where I will write a short story combining those characters
Forever Series: continuing with merges and hosting writing competitions to get more stories minted and more characters created
If you want to learn more, keep reading! I’m going to break down everything above in more detail.
There are essentially two pieces to this pie: Stories and NFTs.
They are related but also separated. So if you don’t care about NFTs then don’t worry, that is just one facet of the project.
I’ll start with the Stories.
Spatium Stories
I am going to release one brand new short story every single month to a Spatium Vault.
There are currently 3 ways to get access to the Spatium Vault:
Flickapp Vaults: this is done by purchasing an NFT key on DeSo
Vault on Solana: this is done by purchasing an NFT key on Solana
This vault is being updated currently but will be live again this week
Substack Vault: this is done by subscribing to the paid version of my Substack (easiest non-technical way)
For this project, however, I’m thinking of adding 2 additional access points to the Vault:
Stories will be minted and released for sale as NFTs
Stories will be published on CloutPub
CloutPub.org is a publishing app built on the DeSo blockchain. That just means it’s like Medium.com but for DeSo users. However, I think it might be free for anyone to read.
I’m thinking until this project gets some traction, I’ll make the stories free on CloutPub. Free until further notice kind of thing. Then once it gets rolling, I’ll remove them.
That’s pretty much the gist of the Stories. The main point is that I’m doing a new “short story” every month with a total of 5 different ways to access them.
I’m being a little flexible with the word “short story” because sometimes it might actually be a continuous story or maybe even a chapter from a novel I’m writing. Only time will tell.
These will be part of the NFT series through Spatium, but if all someone cares about are the stories, then I wanted to make that an easy option.
This leads us to the NFTs.
Spatium Character NFTs
I’m not going to start the Character NFTs for a little bit to try and build some momentum and maybe an audience first. Not to mention trying to figure out how to do the artwork.
But here is the main idea:
Spatium Characters will be one-of-a-kind collectibles of the different characters found in the Spatium Stories.
So for instance, let’s say you read the short story, The Adventures of the Barnyard Gang, I’ll do a Saptium Character NFT of Pig, Duck, Cow, etc. (For those that haven’t read it, those are the names of 3 characters)
Each Spatium Character NFT will also come with a copy of the story where that character was found. That gives people the story if they aren’t part of any of the Spatium Story Vaults.
That’s the main idea behind the “genesis” series.
For those unfamiliar with NFTs and didn’t put it together already, “genesis series” is the typical phrase NFT projects use for their first series. A lot of projects will do multiple series or series types (think Pokemon trading card series), but typically the first one is called the genesis series.
For this project, there are actually going to be 4ish series. I’ll break each one down.
Genesis Series
The genesis series is the first set of NFTs I’m going to release. These will be released over time along with the Spatium Stories.
So every month that there is a new story, soon after there will be some new Spatium Characters to collect.
Each character in the genesis series will correlate directly to one of the Spatium Stories.
Generative Series
The next series will be a generative series. This one will take some time to set up, but it will also require a solid community to back the idea. That’s why we’re starting with a genesis series.
The generative series will allow our audience to mint a random Spatium Character NFT.
A generative NFT series is also a classic in the NFT-world. Here is how it normally works.
You “mint” (which is the word used for buy/create a new NFT) a new NFT in the series and receive a brand new NFT never before seen.
Usually, the NFTs will have multiple traits like eye color, hair color, hats, clothing types, background colors, etc. All that happens is you get a random combination of all those things.
You can see a solid example with this NFT series on Solana: The Meerkat Millionaires Country Club: https://meerkatmillionaires.club/
The reason they are popular is that each item has a certain rarity. So the NFT project creator will make like 20 or so of each trait: 20 different hats, 20 different shirts, etc.
Then each of the 20 will have a different rarity. So for instance, you might have a 90% chance your hat is a baseball hat, but a 1% chance your hat is a cowboy hat on fire or something.
So if you “mint” an NFT that has a lot of these rare traits, it can be pretty valuable. But it’s all based on random luck.
That’s the typical way of doing a generative NFT series.
However, I’m throwing in a twist from your typical generative NFT series, so if you didn’t understand the above, that’s ok!
With each of these randomly minted characters will come a small fiction piece.
It might be a single scene or a speech from the character. Something that will give you an idea of “who” this character is and what their personality is like.
To sum up the generative series: people will be able to mint a totally random character with a randomly assigned scene or speech.
But what can I do with these characters beyond trading them?
Merge Series
Ok, the final series will be an ongoing one. This is the Merge Series.
What do I mean by merge?
This is the fun part. This is the part of this whole NFT project I’m the most excited about. I’m excited about all the previous stuff too, but it’s all just a setup for this.
How this will work is that you can take any number of your Spatium Character NFTs and “merge” them. When you do that, I will write a brand new short story where those NFTs are the main characters.
This will be for both the genesis and the generative series.
So let’s say you bought the Pig character NFT and then you also minted a generative NFT that gave you an arrogant space cowboy named Jim.
You could merge those two together and I’ll write a story about how a space cowboy came to earth, stole Pig from the new farm, and ran off to outer space. Lucy and her dad then have to chase Jim down and get Pig back.
The options will be endless and I hope this will lead to a lot of fun stories!
These stories will also be part of the Spatium Stories Vault, and thus could be part of the published short story compilation I do each year!
Each of those stories will also be minted as an NFT and given to the person who merged them to do with as they please.
The Forever Series
Where is this all going?
There is one more thing I want to do with this project.
A writing competition.
Spatium is going to be it’s own project account on DeSo. For those unfamiliar, on DeSo every account has their own creator coin that people can buy and sell. Think investing in stocks, but you are investing in creators instead.
When you set up your account, you get to set what’s called a Founders Reward, FR for short.
The FR is the amount of money you get to keep whenever someone makes an investment. So for instance, let’s say you set your FR to 10%. Then if someone invests $100 into your creator coin, you would keep $10, and the investor would then receive $90 worth of your coin.
My plan is to set the Spatium FR to a higher number like 25-50%. And all that money will go into writing competitions.
Basically, I’d like to host a writing competition and the winner would receive the FR reward I built up, plus I’d mint their story as an NFT and publish it in both the Spatium Stories Vault and the annual short story compilation.
I will also mint some brand new Spatium Character NFTs and transfer them to the winner.
After a while, if we’re popular enough, perhaps we can be one of the first short fiction publications on DeSo and open up for constant submissions. When you get chosen, you get published plus all your characters are turned into NFTs. I think that would be a lot of fun.
Alright! That’s the whole project. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on rolling this all out at one time. This might take more than a year to build up. Slow and steady wins the race, but at the same time, I want to go ahead and begin. That’s what Bob Goff would do, haha!
Let me know your thoughts! I’m excited to get this rolling!