Matt and I have been friends for a while. He’s a budding writer and podcaster. When he told me about his charity fundraiser, I knew I had to have him on “Tell Me.” Also, listening to him and Tyler talk about the various books is really funny. Good guy. Good heart. Good cause.
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It started last year when I said on my blog and Facebook that I was going to read Twilight in the month of February. The reason behind doing so was a challenge by a friend of mine to read something I frequently hated on, because how could I know my objections, gleaned from other people’s reviews and snippets read on the Internet, were really valid without having ever really read the book. I admitted that he was right at the time, albeit grudgingly, and made it a project: a month of Twilight, “live” blogged as I made my way through Stephanie Meyer’s first novel.
And then my friend Tyler had to go and screw it up by making it worse.
Instead of just one book he challenged me to read all four, the entire Twilight “saga”, in one month and I agreed with one caveat, that if I suffered he had to suffer with me. With February being a short month and me on vacation in the middle of it we pushed our reading to March.
It was from this that our podcast Your Book is Why Daddy Drinks was born. We decided to record our impressions of these first four books, discussing what we didn’t like, what few parts we did, and everything else about Stephanie Meyer’s works, to the background of us drinking. And people seemed to like them. We moved on from there to other stories, touching on science fiction, fantasy, military thrillers, gonzo/bizarro, romance, and a host of other genres in the months since. The podcast grew into one part book review, one part comedy through suffering as other people used Tyler and I to suggest books they might want to read and hear about without having to suffer through actually reading them.
However, this post isn’t really about that. That’s just the history. This post is about the charity drive we’ve got going on right now, This Charity is Why Daddy Drinks.
Before every podcast, having been friends for over a decade, Tyler and I usually talk about the things we’ve got going on in our lives and we started discussing doing something to give back. We make no bones about the size of our listening audience, we’ve got a loyal but small following, but we wanted to see if we could use that to do something cool in an effort to give back and contribute to a charity. We discussed a number of ways we could go about raising money, and which charities we could give to, and eventually decided on Indiegogo for ease of use and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation because we both have people in our lives, adults and kids, who currently live with diabetes.
Here’s how we’re doing it: you, because the JDRF is awesome, donate money and, should we hit our mark of the very low $500 (we wanted an attainable amount), we will pay full-price admission to go see Stephanie Meyer’s The Host on opening night in March of this year, surrounded by squealing, squeeing tweens. If you know Tyler and I, you know that the only way we could possibly ever be forced to do this would be for a good cause and we both agree that we’d suffer a LOT of bad science fiction for the sake of the JDRF. This possible outcome is especially painful for Tyler as he lives in SoCal and would have to drive himself up to the Bay Area, a journey of several hundred miles, because I have a kid and I’m not going down there.
Beyond suffering through The Host, we have a variety of stretch goals attainable if people are feeling particularly generous and/or have it in for making the two of us suffer. For every $200 past the initial $500 we will add a Twilight movie and watch them as part of a Google+ hangout. If we hit $1200 Tyler and I will do the hangout in costume as a member of the Cullen family. We do have a $1600 stretch goal but we’re leaving that as a surprise if we get closer to the mark.
So that’s our charity drive. If you want to make two guys have to suffer through angsty tween supernatural romance movies, or (and more importantly) you just want to give to a good cause, come on over to the Indiegogo page and donate and look us up on iTunes or at whydaddydrinks.net. We record every month!
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Matthew Marovich is a semi-professional author living in the Bay Area of California with his wife, son, and their two dog. His works have appeared on The Edge of Propinquity and in books by Blood Bound Books, Flying Pen Press, and Dagan Books; his next story will be appearing in the Beast Within 4: Gears & Growls anthology edited by Jennifer Brozek.
