So life has been improving a lot lately. We're still mostly broke, but for once in a long time I'm actually on top of just about everything. Rent is taken care of, most of the bills are paid, and we even have a little money left for food. I'm sorry I haven't updated lately, but things have been rather busy. Busy is a good thing, because it means that I've been writing, editing, promoting and otherwise working on my book series. These are good things.
I am, however, having some serious problems with the city and could use some help.
Since we're all disabled, I have to rely on neighbors to do the yard when I can afford to pay them and when they actually can do it. The stars don't align very often, which is one reason why the city doesn't like me. We have some weeds in the yard.
We also have my care provider's car in the driveway, which is in decent shape, it's just not being used right now because we can't afford the registration, gas and insurance. Seeing as we can barely eat some weeks, you probably have a good idea why. We can't move it into our garage because the garage is full. The city is threatening to tow it if we don't do something, so I've been talking to the neighbors about taking down part of the fence briefly so we can put it in the backyard. This is a very bad neighborhood, and nobody does much for anybody here for free, which is also hindering our ability to get this done.
Lastly, we got a new refrigerator from a low income energy program (yay!) to replace our old one. You remember that a bit on Fox News about the gall of poor people having refrigerators? Yeah, well we barely qualify as one of them. Our refrigerator was little more than a 'slightly cool box' that meant we couldn't keep much in it and things went bad fairly quickly. That, luckily, is no longer a problem. Because of the low income program through our electric company we were able to get a brand new refrigerator. It's nothing fancy, but it works, and considering our old one was literally from 1989 I'm not going to complain! We had to do a lot of cleanup in the kitchen and a lot of moving things around, though, and that has left us with enough trash between that and our yard that we will need to rent a dumpster to do anything about it. As you might have guessed, that also requires money above and beyond the bare minimum that we have.
So because of all of this, the city is threatening my landlord with heavy fines since he owns the property, though he's been unemployed for over six months now and not getting by very well, himself. We've been keeping current on rent as best we can lightly, but we owe him a LOT of money from previous years when things were REALLY bad, and there is only so much that he can do for us. As far as getting these issues resolved with the city, I have to figure something out ASAP. Here's an itemized list of what it would take:
$70 to rent the dumpster
$100 to get a few neighbors down part of the fence and move the car into the back - and no, nobody in this neighborhood will help for free. It's not a good neighborhood.
$25 to do the yard
I've also come to realize that we owe $100 on a gas bill that got lost in the shuffle while I was getting everything else straightened up.
In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot, but is more than we have. We've finally gotten to the point that we're treading water again and can mostly keep up on our monthly expenses now, but if we don't resolve these things with the city soon they'll tow the car and hit the landlord was some heavy fines that could potentially get us evicted.
While donations are always humbly welcome, I've decided to knock 25% off of all the prices on my art commissions so that I can hopefully WORK my way through this rather than rely solely on charity. I have a new website now and have a number of samples of my art up along with all of the various prices and ordering information. I also have information on my novella series that I'm working on, including the first episode for free download, and I encourage everyone who thinks they might be interested in it to give it a try.
So that's about it. I've had over 150 copies of the ebook downloaded in last week as a part of the free offer, and I've had almost 500 streams on the podcast version of the book that just went up at Podiobooks.com today. That's just one day! Almost 700 people have either read or listened to my book in the last week alone, and I'm hoping it builds a decent buzz and readership going forward so that I can start selling it starting with episode two in January.
Thank you all for all of your support. It's meant a lot to us, and we're nearly there. We couldn't have done it without you.