Update: MU and I, we doin’ alright now.

Thanks to you folks.

I’m writing this as an update to the old post instead of making a new one, because I’d hate for anybody to read it, run off and break open the piggy bank, and then find out that the crisis has passed.

I went to bed last night on pins and needles. After realizing that I’m not a yogi, I went to bed on a mattress instead, but I still had a lot of tossing and turning followed by some bad dreams. Even having seen the first few notifications come in right after I posted, I took nothing for granted. I thought a number of things might happen, but I didn’t think the benchmark I set would be met and exceeded overnight.

Yeah. Um, it’s going to take a while to total it (because some of it’s in eChecks that haven’t cleared, and some of the Amazon payments haven’t processed yet, and so on), but… there’s like $5,000 here. Seriously. $3,000 was enough to get me out of immediate danger and buy a little breathing room on the future.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

I can only conclude that I’ve underestimated you, in several senses. I’ve underestimated the number of you and I’ve underestimated your generosity and your willingness to support something you enjoy and maybe just your ability to reach out and help another human being. I could go on and on but I should probably post this soon as more people are going to be waking up and I hate to be responsible for causing unnecessary panic.

I’m not going to say “OMG STOP DONATING!!!!!!” if anybody still feels like participating, but at this point nobody needs to sell organs or try out for a reality show or anything drastic like that.

I’ll give you guys a full total later, when the dust settles and after I’ve done the day’s writing, which is also when I’ll update the Void Dogs and Star Harbor Nights banks. I am touched and I am impressed by the number of people who made hundred dollar and larger donations. I am equally touched and impressed by the number of smaller donations that came with a message saying that it was what they could afford and they wished they could give more. As Friar Tuck said to the churchmice, nobody can give more than their last farthing.

And now I’m quoting Disney movies, which means this is officially bordering on maudlin. I’d love to send a personal response to everybody who sent so much as a word of support… and there are a lot of you… but I think that most of the people who did so would much rather I spend my time writing something besides thank yous.

So, here it is, once and for all: thank you.

Original message preserved below.

How important is MU to you?

What would you do to save it?

For some of you, this story is just a bit of fluff entertainment, a casual distraction in your daily routine. Is it a distraction that’s worth paying $1 or $5 to keep around? Other people have described it as being more to them than that. Is it something you’re willing and able to pay to keep around?

It’s no secret that I’ve been scattered lately. There have been days when I haven’t been able to write because things have distracted me, and I haven’t even put up a placeholder or twittered or blogged about it, and the reason for that is that I’m embarrassed.

Some people are saying, “This was inevitable. You can’t write at this rate forever. Writing does not work that way.” To which I respond, it isn’t inevitable. You can. People do. Whether or not you consider what they do “art” or “literature”, there are very successful authors out there who write for six to eight hours a day, every working day. I can do that. I can. I have.

Yes, things are distracting me, but they’re things that wouldn’t be able to distract me if I didn’t have one big distraction right now.

Here it is: I’m broke. I’m worse than broke, in fact. My donation/ad/book model worked so well for so much of the year that when it started to bring down (right around September, naturally) I kept brushing off the lean weeks as being anomalies. I even “topped off” the donation total myself once so I could keep up my momentum. When the donations kept being short of where they needed to be, I didn’t keep doing that, but I didn’t make the mental adjustments, either.

I was already a little in debt because of my taxes and because when I started I was too slow in making the changes to my “impulse buy subroutines” from “I get a huge bonus every other paycheck” to “I don’t get a paycheck”. I had my budget worked out and it worked and I sticked to it… until I craved fast food or saw something shiny, usually in the bookstore, and then my brain registered how much money was in my account, not how much money was coming in.

So, I wasn’t where I needed to be financially, and then my income fell at around the same time my roommate was off her feet for the better part of a month. She had sick leave to use for it, but she was used to having overtime on every paycheck. Then I got sick, and had to go to the doctor and buy medicine. It was nothing dire… just seasonal stuff, but I had to go back a few times and my health care plan consisted of “don’t get sick.” Yeah, I failed.

Right now, I’m living donation to donation, which is like living paycheck to paycheck only worse.

In the past year, the economy’s gone to hell. My rent has gone up. The price of food and gas, two essentials of life, both went way up. They’re going back down which gives me hope for the future, but that doesn’t do anything for the recent past and the present. People have lost their jobs or seen their hours get cut back, and anybody who loses income in a bad economy is getting hit twice: fewer dollars to spend and less spending power with each one.

I’m sure some people are going to jump in here and say that by updating less when things got tough I didn’t do myself any favors in terms of encouraging more contribution from my readers. Sure. That’s true. It’s a vicious cycle. We can even say it’s a chicken-and-egg thing. I’m not going to sit here and debate which one came first, because, to bring this to a point, it doesn’t matter.

I can’t afford to keep doing this. As things stand, I just plain can’t.

I’d like to. I’d love to. For that to happen, I need to get out of the hole I’m in and stop trying to bridge individual $5 and $10 donations together to pay my credit card bills and utility bills.

So, here’s the deal. I’m repeating what I did when I started out: one big donation drive through December to help me shore me up. I’m going to set the goal at the same level: $3,000. I have more readers now than I did then, but I know that isn’t a guarantee of anything. I know a lot of you have been sending money all along and I don’t know that you’ll be able to send more.

You can donate through the links on Star Harbor Nights or Void Dogs and I’ll credit the donations to those stories’ banks as well as counting it towards the goal. It all goes into the same place in the end. If I’m forced to close up shop as a writer and go back to a day job (not the day job, unfortunately… the company I used to work for has downsized my old department and is in a hiring freeze, or I would not be nearly so concerned about my position. That was my fallback. It’s now gone.), I’ll still work my way through the backlogs on those, give people the stories they have paid for.

But trying to write and work at the same time was driving me crazy even when I had a job where I could sit and think for hours without being interrupted. It drove me crazy enough to quit that job, in fact. If I have to go back to work… especially since I’m not likely to get another job that will be so conducive to uninterrupted bouts of mental activity on company time… MU is going up on the shelf. Will it ever come back down? I don’t know. If I could predict the future, I wouldn’t be making this post.

Regardless of how much money I do or don’t get, I’m making a pledge: from here on out I’m Doing It Right. I’m done worrying. If my grand experiment is to be interrupted at this point, that’s that. C’est la vie. Que serra, serra. Alea iacta est. But if I go out I’m going to go out like a writer, writing. I did shit today. I was dealing with a situation involving contractors (fortunately nothing I have to pay for… the one perk of renting) that didn’t eat up the whole day time-wise, but again, I’ve been distractable. It left me in a mood. Tomorrow I’m getting up and I’m writing and I’m producing. The day after that I’m doing the same thing. And the day after that. If things turn around for me before they reach a tipping point otherwise, I’ll be in great form.

It’s possible the response to this post will be a bunch of mocking laughter and words to the effect of “You had your shot and you blew it, and now you want more money?” You know, at this point I don’t even care.

I’m laying it out on the line. A little over a year ago, I was writing and working a day job and I said, “I can’t keep doing this.”, and you folks came through for me. You came through wonderfully. I need you to do that again, and I realize even as I type this that we may be in a situation where you can’t. Even though more people are reading and enjoying MU now than were then, the world has changed and maybe that’s not enough people to keep this show on the road. If not, then it’s time for me to put on my interview clothes and start looking for another line of work.

What will happen to MU in that case? I don’t care to speculate. I don’t know what kind of job I’m going to be doing or what constraints it will put me under or how much time I’ll have where I can do the sort of sitting and thinking that is conducive to being able to go home and write. I feel like MU isn’t the sort of story that would work being told once a week or less.

After I post this I’m going to bed so I can wake up tomorrow ready to be productive. This means I’m not going to see what kind of a response it gets for six or eight hours. I have to tell you that’s probably not going to help my insomnia. In the morning, if appropriate, (i.e., if there are donations), I’ll add a meter to the donation page.

If this works… well, I won’t make the same mistakes again. I’ll save what I can and guard what I save. I’ll buckle down when things get tough. I’ll make it through another year of this, and call the first one a learning experience.

If it doesn’t… well, I’m not going to blame anybody. It’s the economy, stupid Dear Readers. I’ve had enough emails to the effect of “I wish I could donate” and “I’m sorry I can’t donate” to know what’s going on. I’m not even going to feel that bad about it. I had a year. That’s more than some people thought I’d manage.

Here are the donation links.

When I make a donation entreaty… and it’s been a while since I’ve done more than a one-liner, precisely because I’ve known it’s hard out there for everybody… normally I add that if you can’t donate, it’s just as good to spread the word. If you bring in more readers and they bring in more readers and so on, then even if you and your friends are all broke somebody’s going to find $5 and feel like I’ve brightened their day enough to be worth that. Right now, with the future of MU up in the air, I’m going to leave it up to you whether or not you want to get more people hooked on it.

Regardless of what happens, thank you… whether you’ve ever donated or just been here to read, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to write for you.

(Cross posted to my blog.)