I have had to resort to crowdfunding for difficult situations in the past. I never wanted to have to go this route again. I hoped the last time would really be the last time. But this is not just difficult. It is truly, absolutely the greatest nightmare with which I have ever been confronted.

As of November 14 I will no longer have a residence. I am going to have to move out of where I’ve been living since 2016, and not voluntarily. Frankly, I never meant to be here for this long; I wanted to leave in a few months, not after several years. I’m not actually ready to go now. I wanted to go when I was prepared and I’m just not. I have tried to keep myself going with freelance fiction writing work, and I have looked for other ways to set myself up better than that, with a better cash flow. Even now I have been immersing myself in ways to make a Printable Art business on Etsy work for me. Printable Art is said to be one of the most lucrative “hustles” you can do online, and as you know I am an artist of some skill. I have also bought a course on Udemy to learn how to be a Pinterest Virtual Assistant, which is another of the most lucrative things you can do online. But the Etsy store is not ready yet (I’ve been planning to open it for the holidays), I haven’t had time to start the Udemy course in the midst of everything else I’m dealing with, and I am not ready yet. The owner of the house where I’ve been residing does not care whether I’m ready or not. I am done here, and as I write this I don’t know yet where I’m going to end up.

This situation is the result of my best client earlier this year not getting me any work for three months, no other work becoming available in the meantime, my being burned out on the other writing work I was doing, and nothing else that I tried to do to reestablish a cash flow working out. As it is, that best client did end up getting me a few more assignments that got me through the summer. But in the meantime, unpaid expenses kept piling up to an insurmountable degree and my situation became totally unsustainable. Which is why as of November 14 I don’t know where I’m going to end up. I’m having right now the greatest anxiety I’ve ever experienced. I went for help to certain public agencies and they had me believing they were going to help me. Then they pulled the rug out from under everything because of the gaps in my cash flow. This is the way the world works. People look at you and see nothing but how much money you’re making at a given moment, and that is the criterion they use to judge how worthy you are of help. That is why I’m not just anxious; I’m as angry and disgusted as it is possible for me to be. And I am also in the worst trouble that I’ve ever been in.

The other part of my problem is a storage space that I have, which contains things from the house where I used to live. The things in that space are irreplaceable or extremely difficult to replace. They include personal things of my art and my writing—sketchbooks, art books, precious books of other kinds, papers of stories and art going back for decades, rare autographed art that I’ve collected, mementos from high school including my yearbook, treasured photographs from my student years, years of my best comic books by my most influential artists, a bed that was a gift from my late mother—so many things that represent a huge amount of my life. Even a personally signed book of my mother’s poetry. The contents of that space are going to be auctioned off on November 18. Losing all that would be like losing everything in a fire. So in a matter of weeks, I’ll be lost and most of the material part of my life will be also.

And that brings me to this, a measure that I never wanted to take again. But things have never been as dire and terrible as they are now. I can understand some of you wondering, Why is he so needy all the time? It’s an excellent question. Someone capable of the things I can do, someone capable of the things I have to offer, should never, ever be in need. But the world has been designed as a place where the needs of gifted people are not a priority. I’m still going to stock and open that Etsy store (the artwork is ready; the store setup is in the works) and I’m still going to use the methods I’ve been learning to make it work for me. I am also still going to seek other professional and business opportunities for myself. But at the moment I have never needed help more than I need it right now. Things are as bad as they can possibly get, after the loss of months of cash flow and the miserable failure of certain agencies to assist me.

Help if you can. I’ll appreciate it. Thank you from my heart in advance.