The book is called “When I was a kid: Childhood stories by Boey”. The stork brought it by post couple of weeks ago.

Boey, a Malaysian artist living in Newport, California, and known for his art on coffee cups (what a dream job that is eh), started writing about his day to day life in a blog about four years ago.

Then he realized he really didn’t like reading long blogs – which means he won’t be reading this – and so he drew stick figures and wrote couple of lines to tell the stories.

This grew into a book idea and since I guess you can’t make too much money from coffee cup art, he put the project on Kickstarter and that’s where I found him. His is one of the successful projects that raised what it wanted – 112 backers gave him a total of US$8,239. His goal was $7,800.

What I was impressed by was how diligent Boey was in meeting his commitments. If you bought a certain package, he’d promise you a list of things – postcards, items, etc, informing you of his progress.

I received my updates as promised and before I knew it, the book had been completed, published and sent with a personal message. In his activity updates on Kickstarter, he said, “i went to the office supply stores and envelopes were 100 bucks. so i ordered them online instead and it was 21 dollars. mark ups are crazy i tell you.” (No wonder people are going online to buy stuff.)

It’s a sweet book. Simple. Brings back memories of my own childhood in Penang. I guess I connected to that.

But I connected most to his dream of writing and publishing a book. Just as sales people are the easiest to sell to (I think), writers (not publishers) are probably the easiest to talk into helping get books published.

In his blog, Boey says, “The funding I receive from you guys will go into putting the book together. Additional money will be used for creating promotional items for the blog.

“I am thinking T-shirts, figurines, and if the book does well, there will be a second, and I’ll use whatever money is left for that. Part of the sales of the book will also go to charity, probably the ones that helps build schools or end world hunger.”

When told “those are big dreams, Boey”, he said, “Well, that’s the one thing I do a lot of that doesn’t require funding.”

So here I am, Monday morning dreaming, and thinking, it’s great to have dreams and even better when you can reach out to the virtual universe and strangers help you out.

It also happens in the real world. Like last Saturday evening when I was walking home in the rain and a stranger with an umbrella said, “Can I share this with you?” and walked me home.

Now I’d better get off my butt because I just read an article that says “too much sitting may shorten your life”. Luckily, it didn’t say anything about too much dreaming.