Help keep WLP on the road.
Donation protected
I make my living selling things at conventions under the trade name White Lightning Productions. This involves a lot of long-distance driving and some considerable risk on investment.
2015 was a very good year, but 2016 was generally bad, as was the first part of 2017. I went into fall of this year with a fairly large debt load and unable to make any large investments except for emergencies or prior commitments. With that in mind, I took my 2003 Honda minivan to the shop in mid-October to add a transmission cooler to extend the vehicle's life another 50,000 miles to give me time to pay down debt and invest in a new vehicle.
That plan appears to have backfired, as I currently (while I write this) sit 600+ miles from home, four days after the transmission service, with warning lights on the van that indicate said transmission is not long for the world and might not even get me within the 200 mile range of my AAA membership to get towed home.
Nor is this the first major expense I've incurred this year. In the past month I've spent about $600 restoring my main business desktop computer. In June I laid out $300 for data recovery of a flash drive. I've bought merchandise for resale and commissioned artwork for shirts and comics, not all of which have paid for themselves. This is a large part of why my debt load is high at the moment.
Now I have a difficult decision to make. Getting home is a comparatively minor thing- though it might cost me hundreds of bucks. But replacing the transmission will cost as much as the van is worth. I also have four more conventions in the four weekends following, two of which require very long drives. Therefore I need to make a decision very quickly whether to repair the van or spend money on a replacement.
Your donations will help pay for getting me from Birmingham back to the Big Thicket of southeast Texas and, after that, for repair or replacement of my van. It will also help with my debt load by limiting how much I add to that load.
In any case, the sooner I get the money together the better. Time is pressing, because conventions won't change their dates for one vendor, and winter is the lean time for vendors like me.
2015 was a very good year, but 2016 was generally bad, as was the first part of 2017. I went into fall of this year with a fairly large debt load and unable to make any large investments except for emergencies or prior commitments. With that in mind, I took my 2003 Honda minivan to the shop in mid-October to add a transmission cooler to extend the vehicle's life another 50,000 miles to give me time to pay down debt and invest in a new vehicle.
That plan appears to have backfired, as I currently (while I write this) sit 600+ miles from home, four days after the transmission service, with warning lights on the van that indicate said transmission is not long for the world and might not even get me within the 200 mile range of my AAA membership to get towed home.
Nor is this the first major expense I've incurred this year. In the past month I've spent about $600 restoring my main business desktop computer. In June I laid out $300 for data recovery of a flash drive. I've bought merchandise for resale and commissioned artwork for shirts and comics, not all of which have paid for themselves. This is a large part of why my debt load is high at the moment.
Now I have a difficult decision to make. Getting home is a comparatively minor thing- though it might cost me hundreds of bucks. But replacing the transmission will cost as much as the van is worth. I also have four more conventions in the four weekends following, two of which require very long drives. Therefore I need to make a decision very quickly whether to repair the van or spend money on a replacement.
Your donations will help pay for getting me from Birmingham back to the Big Thicket of southeast Texas and, after that, for repair or replacement of my van. It will also help with my debt load by limiting how much I add to that load.
In any case, the sooner I get the money together the better. Time is pressing, because conventions won't change their dates for one vendor, and winter is the lean time for vendors like me.
Organizer
Kristan Overstreet
Organizer
Livingston, TX
