Drying up fast.

Photo copyright Aji, 2024; all rights reserved.

That's our drive this morning. Everything is drying up fast now, That's what winds like these do, and it's what makes this twelve-hundred-year drought so impossible to manage, never mind end.

As metaphors go, it's a particularly nasty one, and particularly apt. This year, just shy of three full months gone, has already been a horror show of disaster and need, and we have already expended far too much of trying to ameliorate both. We'll have to pay taxes this week, the full shot, and we simply do not have it.

And that's not all. On top of the taxes and the expenses and everything else that's bedeviling me and imperiling my health right now, there's a new wrinkle:  PayPal, not content with making fees off us and endlessly greedy, is apparently pissed that I didn't leave the proceeds of our flash sale in there for them to make interest off a 21-day float. On our money. And so they're trying to cap what we can transfer per month, never mind that we've had this account for more than twenty fucking years, and none of this is outside normal patterns. It's pure corporate billionaire greed.

So, 1) do NOT donate to my Ko-Fi account or anything else, do not pay us via PayPal, in any way before April.  And 2), if you're in the market to buy Wing's work, let me know and I can put it through our VISA/MC payment processor and bypass these cannibals entirely.

Because I am profoundly sick of their shit.

This comes on top of the realization that last yar damaged us more badly than I knew. Our practice has long been to give something [what folks now call paying forward] out of every sale. That's going to have to stop for a while. So many people came to us for help last year. We didn't turn any of them away, even when it meant tighter belts for us. Now? Now, the tax bill is due, and we don't have nearly enough to pay it. Why? In part because people have come to us this year already at even higher rates. The amount that we've given away/spent on folks in more immediate need . . . it's a lot.

In part, too, because we had to pay out nearly $10K [cash] since the leachfield failed on Christmas Day to deal with the septic disaster. And in part because my Patreon, our steadiest source of income, is down more than $700 a month since this time last year. Do you what that kind of hit does to folks like us?

 We have to pay this, and we have nowhere near enough to cover it. The only way to do that is to make several decently-sized sales very fast [NOT, obviously, via PayPal]. Because everything that came in prior to this went on the damn leachfield replacement. I'm tearing my hair out, because there is nothing I can do to fix it.

I don't know what to do. I can't force people to buy. Somehow, I have to bring in sales. If you're in the market, now would be a really, REALLY good time. There's lots of new work on the site. And as always, all the regular links are listed below, with sales, as always, being the most important:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here ( we'll always need the liquid soaps that I can't get here, the dog treats for the monsters, and Amazon and Lowe's cards [the Lowe's cards are probably going to have to go on a new fridge, so I'm hoarding them]); 
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

After such a grim 2023, and with this year starting off MUCH worse, we really need to get 2024 moving onto a better footing, so please share all of the links. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.