While I’m thinking about it, I wanted to say thank you.
I know that renting myself out on eBay is not the career direction I want to take long-term. But this month it saved us. We would not have made the mortgage or any of the other bills without it.
I want to see if I can keep that from ever happening again.
Meanwhile, for this month, I am deeply grateful for eBay, and for the folks here who were willing to use eBay to bid on something as strange as worldbuilding lessons and manuscript crits.
To every one of you who bid, thank you.
To those of you who won, thank you twice. We’ll have some fun with this in the upcoming months, and we will accomplish good things.
And as an odd aside — while the bidding was going on, I kept thinking of H. Beam Piper. He was the wonderful creator of the Fuzzies, (first book, The Fuzzy Papers), brilliantly-crafted anthropological science fiction with heart that holds up well when reread today. He was also in dire financial straits, and while waiting for his books to make him a living, faced the fact that he was not going to be able to pay his debts. He killed himself just as his work was starting to take off. I kept thinking that if he’d had eBay, he might have found a way to make enough money to pay his bills. He might have held on long enough to see his work receive the recognition that it deserves, and he might have continued writing in the world he created for years to come.
The old days may have been better for a lot of people. Not for writers, though.
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