So since I don't use social media I realize not a lot of people have necessarily heard about what's been happening with me lately.

For Christmas, I developed a lovely little case of sepsis. That wasn't fun. If you can avoid it, don't get sepsis, people. So I was hospitalized for a while and they managed to make me de-septic but never found out what caused it in the first place.

Cut to not even a week after being released and I'm suddenly back in the hospital because it turns out I have a nasty abscess. Cause of sepsis confirmed, and also it took three surgeries to get the abscess itself fully removed. Had to spend another three weeks or so in the hospital for that.

Ever since the end of January I've been home but still slowly recovering. I've had a lot of really rough home recovery stuff to go through, and it's not entirely done. In just over two weeks I get to learn whether I need to have even more surgery or not.

So yeah the year hasn't been going super great on my end, but I'm fighting on.

want very much to be a better friend but first I need to learn how to be a better person.

It’s tough. It feels like, in a very real way, none of my life that I lived up until pandemic mattered, and all that I’m left with is the pieces that made it through.

On an intellectual level I know that isn’t true, but I’m not holding on to much in the way of either hope or expectations.

It’s weird to think I’ve lost touch with a whole bunch of friends because I couldn’t financially afford to keep up with the community over the years. Ah well.

Sorry I don’t ever have better news to share. I promise if there’s good enough news that comes my why I’ll share it.

Likewise, I apologize to anyone who’s messaged me out of the blue to ask how I’m doing and hasn’t gotten a response. The answer is usually too negative for me to want to get into so I tend to just kind of avoid answering those messages.

Please don’t feel obligated to stick around. Years of knowing a person who paid to have a cute fox icon drawn for them isn’t the same thing as loyalty or friendship and I totally get that.

Thinking about that time I literally saved a friend’s life and he repaid me with emotional trauma that caused me to hypercompartmentalize all my interpersonal relationships for the rest of my life.

After nearly a decade of ignoring my constant railing about how Twitter is pure social poison, suddenly my friends all agree with me now that it’s weeks from falling to shit.

Ah well. Better late than never but I wish I hadn’t lost so many friends over something that’s now super obvious.

So I still use this site to look at art and favorite pieces every now and again but I’m not really “community active” anymore and I don’t expect to be producing anything furry-related to post here anytime soon, just to set expectations and all before you decide to follow me.

It’s finally come, and it looks and feels like I always knew it would.

I was never good enough for myself and cute icons I paid other people to draw don’t change that fact.

Not a huge surprise, I suppose.

I’m quiet because I don’t have the energy to talk to people anymore. Also I don’t do much of anything anymore so there’s not a lot to talk about.

Not a lot to say I guess. I’m miserable and my life is empty but that’s the same for a lot of people these days so that’s just kind of what it is.

I know I don’t owe it to anyone to have ever been anyone besides myself but I’m still sorry I wasn’t someone better than this.

Every now and then, some brief and sudden fragment of... something, I'm not sure what to call it, flashes into my life.

It's something sort of like nostalgia, but more of an in-the-moment feeling than a longing for the past; some brief flicker of what it felt like to experience something forgotten, and then suddenly gone again.

It's an emotional experience that's just pleasant enough to hurt, too fleeting to be properly enjoyed, leaving a lingering memory of something that isn't there anymore and won't be again, because the past is the past and that world, that time, that life is gone now, leaving only the present.

...I remember why I left.

The Twitter aspect of the Furry community has long since had anything positive to offer me, and now I don't even relate to it in the slightest.

Good riddance to a bad platform, really.

Life got pretty bad a while back and my mental bandwidth on a typical day is just completely shot.

I'm not mad and I'm not trying to avoid anyone. I'm just emotionally tired all the time and don't have a lot of positive, upbeat stuff to talk about, and I don't have the energy or desire to talk about the bad stuff going on, so I just haven't been reaching out much.

I hope people understand.

Lately, I've discovered one sure-fire way to kill any sense of loss and longing for the things I've left behind is to go back and briefly let myself re-experience those things.

Almost immediately I remember why I left them behind in the first place and the nostalgia fades.

...how's that collapse of American society treating everybody?

Hey folks,

Figured I'd post an update here, since I finally burned my Twitter account to the ground earlier this year and it seems like that's really the only place furries want to do much of anything online, and so for a lot of people I basically ceased to exist and maybe some of them are also on FA and will see this instead.

I guess there's not a lot to say. Like almost everyone else out there I've had a pretty terrible year, 2020 being what it has been. 2019 as a year had also basically wiped me out, financially as well as personally, and instead of the final nail in the coffin this pandemic was basically the steamroller that drove all the way over it. I haven't had any real income since lockdown began this spring, and that's not looking likely to change anytime soon, but I've got a roof over my head and I can feed myself, so at the bare minimum I've got the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs taken care of for the time being.

Otherwise there's not really a lot to report. As I said above, I mostly stopped existing for people, and most people I used to interact with didn't bother to keep tabs on me after I left Twitter; that's actually probably for the best, since if someone only remembers I exist when they see my fox icon pop up in their feed, it's not like I'm missing out on much. And it's not like I've been to a con that wasn't in my own backyard since I think 2013, so even with cons not happening anymore I wasn't going to be running into folks anyway even without the whole country on a pandemic lockdown.

Therapy went well for me this year. My anxiety and panic issues that used to plague me daily and make life intolerable have been wrestled largely under control. Now, though, I'm just kind of filling time without doing much of importance or really worth reporting on. I don't miss much about what I used to spend my time doing, since all it did was make me miserable, and I've had no desire whatsoever to return to Twitter because I still think social media is pure cultural poison and probably just getting worse as time goes on. I do, however, feel like my spark of self kind of died inside, which is kind of a silver lining because I don't have the emotional bandwidth to care about a lot of things anymore, so seeing to my necessities is a lot easier without needless distractions.

So yeah, I'm not in a good place at all, but I'm alive and I'm not homeless. Kind of the bare minimum, but honestly with the shape of the world right now I guess it could be worse, and I can let myself be thankful for that.

It was my good friend Paulie, my closest sci-fi loving companion for my entire adult life, who pointed out that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of Star Trek: Generations.

Now, say what you will about the quality of the movie, especially in retrospect; the content of the film itself is irrelevant to my point here.

Back in the autumn of 1994, I was fifteen years old, and at the fervent peak of my teenage obsession with Star Trek. DS9 had just hit the airwaves, TNG itself was coming hot off of the glorious series finale “All Good Things,” my 800-Trekker newsletters were coming in the mail,, and—last but certainly not least—Decipher’s Star Trek: The Next Generation Collectable Card Game was eating whatever money I had left after buying all those Star Trek books I was powering through hungrily.

(A year or two later, my buddy Wayne gave me his copy of Chrono Trigger in exchange for $20 so he could buy a Garak action figure at a Star Trek convention; later we both agreed I’d gotten the better bargain.)

But anyway, it was opening night of “Star Trek: Generations” and I HAD to see it. This was before the days when normal households had the Internet, and so I wasn’t worried about spoilers per se (in those days, ‘regular’ people weren’t as open about their love of Star Trek). No, I was just gung-ho about the Next Gen crew finally hitting the big screen and I HAD to see this movie ASAP.

Despite having some Trek-loving friends, for whatever reason, none of my friends were available to go see the movie with. I asked my siblings, but they were either busy or uninterested. I went anyway, by myself. I must’ve had one of my parents drive me because I was too young to have a license or even a permit by then.

It was the big new movie theater up on the hill in Braintree that overlooked the South Shore Plaza, where I would go on to see such films as Mulan, Armageddon, and The X-Files Movie, where this one usher was a total G for letting me sneak in and join my friends after I’d rushed there after closing down the restaurant I worked at only to find they were technically sold out.

The lobby was packed with a crowd of people waiting to see the movie. This was the mid-90s, and sorting out big crowds for opening night wasn’t the science it is today. No lines, just a massive throng. Here and there were folks in Klingon garb and simple tees meant to look like Starfleet uniforms. I was wearing a little toy NextGen-era combadge on my chest.

The crowd was still waiting for the ushers to let us into the theater. The tension was palpable, everyone facing the doors as one.

Then I pressed my combadge, it’s signature beep permeating the lobby.

The crowd turned to me in unison at the sound, with the audible rustle you hear when that sort of thing happens in a movie or on TV. A few feet away, a man in his early-to-mid twenties lit up and said, “Dude, that is AWESOME.”

When I think about that time I went and saw “Star Trek: Generations” on opening night, I don’t think about ultimately being disappointed in the film itself. I don’t think about how it was kind of a waste of Captain Kirk and the TOS cast, how the plot itself makes little to no sense, or how it blatantly reused the shot of the exploding Bird of Prey from the climax of the Trek film from RIGHT BEFORE this one.

No, when I think about that time I went to see Generations all by myself, I think about how I had a great time experiencing a franchise I loved and still love, at one of the best ages to be in love with something that inspires you. I remember how great it felt to know I’d made some random guy’s night with the simple press of a communicator button. And I remember all of this other stuff on the outsides of that memory, the various diversions and asides I’ve gone through here.

Take time to appreciate enjoying the things you love, people. Even if—especially if—they’re not exactly perfect.

I’ve always had a difficult relationship with, well, relationships.

Specifically, I’m talking about ‘relationships’ in the sense that first pops into mind for most people when they hear the word in a vacuum: some kind of committed dating relationship between people. As something of a late bloomer myself, I didn’t actually date anyone in high school. Or in college. By the time I was done with school I knew that I was gay, and so finally in my early twenties I got into my first real relationship with another person.

It didn’t work out. There were a number of different reasons for this, which aren’t worth getting into now, nearly two decades after the fact. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t a nasty break-up or anything—nobody cheated on anyone, there were no fights or abuse, nothing like that. It was, as they often say, one of those things that just didn’t work out. The two of us are, to this day, still very close friends.

My next relationship didn’t really work out, either. I remember trying so hard to make my boyfriend happy, and how much it never seemed like I was good enough at it. It was a long-distance thing, and when he finally came to visit, things were somehow worse than before. He dumped me at the airport right before flying home, after telling me he was taking life in a different direction. I took things pretty goddamn hard.

Speaking of taking that break-up really goddamn hard, most of my close friends were extremely confused, in large part because barely any of them had even known I’d had a boyfriend. It wasn’t a secret relationship or anything like that, either; I’m just a really private person when it comes to my personal life, and I guess it just never occurred to me to share what was going on with people.

My next several relationships followed a very similar pattern to my first: make an awesome new friend, develop a really strong bond, get into a relationship, ultimately break up because I was constantly miserable about the relationship, and then winding up better and stronger friends after splitting up.

Because that was the thing: my problem was never with the other person—it was always with the relationship itself.

It baffled me. I knew that relationships were about compromise, but no matter how much I gave and gave, it never felt like enough. I was constantly anxious over my every decision and whether my boyfriend would be happy about it; I was so uncertain as to whether or not I deserved satisfaction from making someone else happy; eventually I’d start to feel resentment over the fact that none of the positive emotions I got back from the relationship made up for even a fraction of the constant misery being in that relationship made me feel. I knew I meant it whenever I told them I loved them, so...why?

I was the one who cut all these relationships off. It’s difficult to describe exactly how awful it feels to break up with someone when you still love them and they haven’t done anything wrong. It was even more difficult for me to understand why I needed to do it, but whenever I did, everything got so much better, for me and for the other person (eventually, at least).

And so the years went by. I never really figured out what the deal was with all my past relationships, but I knew that as I was growing and learning as a person, I was also learning how to establish bonds with people on my own terms. People who were special to me, who I wasn’t dating, but who I loved (and love) all the same. Sure, I had no plans to get into long-term relationships or get married or anything like that, but I at least knew that, even if I didn’t know why.

In the mid-2010s, my depression got really, really bad. I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say, it was a pretty dark time for me, but my friends eventually helped me turn things around and I went to get professional help. Just before that was starting, I’d begun to question whether or not I was asexual. I certainly hadn’t been asexual earlier in life, but I was older now, and people change in lots of different ways, their sexuality among them. I had no libido, and I knew I didn’t want to be with anyone; I just started to accept that maybe I was done with all that.

Well, long story short, getting treatment for depression was a godsend for me, and with my depression and anxiety receding and under control, my libido came raging back to the forefront. Definitely not asexual, then. Which was confusing, but I didn’t think too hard about it at the time; I was just happy to be feeling like my old self again. Over the next several months I forged some very nice connections with close friends of mine. Some of it was sexual; some of it wasn’t. Therapy had taught me to accept myself and my life on my own terms, and the personal relationships I had with people grew so much more naturally as a result.

And then Pride Month hit, and I felt a strange lack of commitment on my own part. Something didn’t feel right, still. And then, one night, while chatting with one of the people closest to me, a word popped up in the conversation that set off a cascade effect within me and my thoughts:

Aromantic.

It seemed almost too silly to consider, at first. It’s not like it was the first time I’d ever heard the term, obviously, and I knew what the concept was. But to have it pop up in that conversation, describing him, and then describing me... my brain wouldn’t let go. For days and days, I kept asking myself, “Am I? Am I? Am I?”

The fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it told me everything I needed to know, though. It was something I’d always known, at least on some level. I’d thought about it in other terms at points in the past—that I was ‘wired wrong,’ that I just made for a shitty boyfriend, that relationships with people just weren’t important to me. But now, suddenly, I had a word and a concept that encapsulated what I was so clearly and concisely that I didn’t have any real doubt that it applied to me.

I did my due diligence over the next week or so, reading up on materials every day, seeing what other people had to say about the aromantic spectrum, the aromantic experience, and all that. I’m still figuring it all out for myself, what it means for me, and for the people in my life, but I’m writing this now, feeling like the last twenty years of my adult life finally make sense in retrospect when I look at it through this lens. As Princess Leia famously said to Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi: “Somehow, I’ve always known.”

I am aromantic and, as far as I can tell, I always have been. I’m okay with this. I am not broken, I am not wrong; I am simply different, and other people out there are different in the same or similar way.

I’m gay. And I’m aromantic. I still experience attraction and affection and passion and all those other wonderful emotions. There are people in my life that I share an incredibly strong bond with. Sometimes it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s sexual. Sometimes it’s both. The important thing is that I’m not lonely or sad or lost or incomplete because I don’t have or want a boyfriend.

I still love people, and I’m lucky enough to have people in my life who love me back.

Hey folks,

If you're seeing that I've posted a new journal here and are surprised to hear from me, I don't blame you. If the impression you've gotten of me from the last few years is that I've become some sort of an antisocial hermit who doesn't talk to anyone or do much of anything anymore, you're not really wrong on that count, either.

I won't bother to recap the various things that have happened over the past few years; it's all in my journal here (easy enough to find since I don't post too much) and if you're reading this, you probably either already know enough or at least know all that you care to. The last few months in particular, though, have been rather brutal and probably warrant special attention.

My financial and personal situations have been wearing me thin, just in terms of stress and more stress and more stress on top of that, so psychologically I've been rather ill-equipped to deal with other hardships being thrown at me, and in early/mid-Febrauary I came down with some (evidently) harmless health issues that, thanks to my wonderful ability to have coincidental circumstances dogpile on me whenever its least convenient and most damaging, turned into a very, very confusing mishmash of symptoms that triggered a debilitating bout of hypochondria that lasted over two months.

Long story short, logically knowing that what I was feeling couldn't be what was actually wrong didn't matter to my panic and my anxiety and apparently my subconscious. I've had nasty, full-on panic attacks in the past; I'm talking several hours of honestly, truly feeling like I was about to die and not being able to convince myself otherwise, either alone or with other people. Thankfully they've been rare, maybe once every three to five years on average.

In the past two months alone I had three of them, along with a couple dozen more minor anxiety episodes, mostly about my health.

It got to the point where I was incapable of not thinking about any and everything physical sensation to come through my body. If the cord of my headphones brushed against my abdomen while my shirt was riding up from the way I was sitting, the sensation would hit me with a jolt of panic. Heck, some nights, the sensation of falling asleep would alarm me into waking right back up. About the only thing that could distract me was work, of all things. Socializing and having fun were hampered by the constant background fretting.

Finally, at around 4 o'clock on Friday morning, I kind of... just hit a limit. The physical weirdness had gotten to the point where if I kept ignoring it, I was afraid I was honestly going to either lose my mind or else die from whatever problem I hoped I was just being paranoid about. So, I went and checked myself into the emergency room to get checked out.

(If you're wondering why I spent two months panicking about my health without doing anything about it, I'll just point out that I am riding the cusp of bankruptcy and am already being crushed by medical debt. The very last thing I wanted to do was go and see a doctor and get a bunch of expensive tests done to track down some mystery ailment that probably only existed in my head. At one point I DID call my doctor about my symptoms and he blew me off completely, which is probably why I'll be finding a new doctor once I have the bandwidth to do so, assuming my garbage poor person health insurance lets me.)

Anyway, I wound up getting an abdominal CT scan on Friday morning (thanks to a doctor who actually took my concerns seriously) and the myriad list of things that I'd secretly been terrified might be going on (massive hernia, colitis, some muscular deformity in the abdominal wall, peritonitis, blood flow issues, cancer, you name it) were pretty conclusively ruled out.

And as ridiculous as it sounds, as much as I already KNEW it probably wasn't any of those things, my subconscious fears hadn't been able to let go of the possibility for months. And now that I'd been shown pretty conclusively that, hey, things inside my torso are actually pretty normal and in decent shape for someone my age in my condition, that's just... gone away. Finally.

This is probably all long and rambling. The tl;dr version is that, after months of debilitating health anxiety, almost all of it went away basically overnight, and I feel a whole lot better. Yeah, there's a lot of other shitty stuff going on in the still-on-fire garbage pile that is my life, but at least I can sleep at night again and touch my own stomach without worrying that it's going to rupture or some shit, and maybe it's kind of sad that that's a huge step up for me, but I'll take it.

Anyway, sorry if I've seemed really on-edge and always constantly upset lately. It's only just because I've been dealing with so much mental anguish and shit that I WAS constantly on-edge and upset. Hopefully that's not the case as much from here on out.

I don't know how many people still read my FA journals, but here's another writeup about what the heck is going on with my life lately that has me so miserable.

http://pastebin.com/98vqUjX4

Hey folks,

So, a week or so ago, I made a post about my financial difficulties, basically explaining the situation I'm in (short version: bad business deal caused me to lose out on ~7 months' pay when I was already borderline broke).

Obviously, being broke is a really difficult and very upsetting situation. No, it's not something that just happened overnight, but to wind up there right on the heels of working really hard on something for two-thirds of a year and getting basically nothing for the efforts meant I had every reason to expect I'd be in a much better position instead of a far, far worse one.

I have more work now. I have quite a bit of work, in fact, from clients who pay very well and who really like the work I do. This is great news. It means I'll be able to rebuild. But the problem is that seeing the money for that is a long ways out, and in the meantime, I was still left with nothing after this last failed venture.

Here in the U.S., we're brought up our entire lives with the message that so long as you work hard and keep a positive attitude, everything will work out. Unfortunately, there are some cases where that simply isn't true, and my situation--being months behind on rent and health insurance and having no money to pay for it--was one of them. Short of walking out on my current contracts (and, effectively, the career I've worked my entire adult life for) and getting a part-time job somewhere (or selling an organ or something), I wasn't going to see money for weeks or more, and no amount of positive thinking and working hard (I was at least doing that last one) was going to change that.

Now, we're also brought up to not give up on our dreams, and I think if I'd suggested that I was going to do that as a course of action, everyone would have told me not to (unless they wanted to be snide in hindsight and say of COURSE I should have swallowed my pride and done whatever was necessary, I guess).

So you might be wondering what I'm getting at here. Mainly I'm just trying to get people to understand three things about me and my situation. But first, let me just clarify: I am paid up on my medical insurance now. Also, while I still owe a bunch of back rent as well, I'm not going to go homeless all of a sudden, either.

But so onto my points for getting into all this:

1) Lots of people seem to think that the reason I'm upset is because of this failed business venture, or because I don't consider myself successful, or something along those lines. Or they think it's something like I'm blaming myself for the fact that it happened. That's not the case. That really does have nothing to do with it. It really is JUST as simple as, "I have no money for rent and medicine." That's fucking terrifying, and I like to think pretty straightforward, but for some reason lots of people are trying to find some deeper psychological reason for it. But it really IS that simple, I promise you.

2) I'm not ashamed of the fact that I've needed help. Thankfully, I've gotten some amazing help very recently, and while I don't necessarily feel I deserve it, I'm not too proud to accept it. But when your only real options are "beg for help you honestly don't think you deserve" or "walk away from your dreams," the idea of just calmly and casually asking for help seems impossible, and so I'm incredibly grateful that I have friends who were willing to step forward and offer to help me out in ways I was quite literally incapable of helping myself.

3) I'm not mad at anyone. I'm really not. I do, however, get frustrated and upset very easily. It is incredibly demoralizing to be in a situation where you're too busy with work to do anything about the fact that you don't have any money, and having to do it for so long has robbed me of my emotional reserves, and so whenever Yet Another Thing Goes Wrong (as it so often does), there's a good chance that my internal coping mechanisms just aren't there, and that causes me to just fall apart completely, emotionally and mentally. So rather than being mad at anyone, I'm just incredibly grateful for the folks who have stuck by me, because I can only imagine how insufferable I've been in recent months.



Allie Brosh, of Hyperbole and a Half fame, has a great bit in one of her articles about depression where she tries to explain that her fish are dead, and her friends offer to help her find them, and she's stuck trying to explain that, no, that isn't what my problem is, why aren't you listening to me? That is exactly how I've been feeling for the last several weeks, just trying to explain myself in simple terms even to close friends who seem to be reacting to a different problem than the one I'm trying so hard to explain.

I guess this post is my dead fish comic. I'm just trying to explain what's going on, in simple terms, not just so that people know what's going on, but so they know why I'm feeling and acting the way I've been feeling.

And again, I've been so lucky and so grateful to have gotten help here where I've needed it most. I'm not sure I can ever properly thank them for that, but I owe it to all of the people I know and care about to try, because once I can reach a point where I feel like what they did was worth it and that I deserved the help I didn't think I deserved at the time, I'll be in a place where I can finally be the sort of person other people deserve me to be.

Hey folks!

If you're a contributor to my Patreon, I've made a massive overhaul to how everything works over there, both in terms of what content I'll be putting out and what the various contribution tiers and rewards are. Click here for details.

If you're NOT a contributor to my Patreon, or if you didn't see it before, don't worry, because everything's all brand new and shiny in terms of what you can expect!

Basically, I'm going to be pumping out short stories for free, no payment necessary, none, nada! However, if folks are able to give enough support, I can start writing additional stories, commissioning illustrations to go with those stories, and other fun things as well. Again, the content is FREE to everyone (and anything furry-related will be posted here, as well), but if you're a fan of my work and want to help me make more of it, I'd appreciate even if you just swung by the Patreon and saw what it was about.

If you're interested, swing on by here to check things out: https://www.patreon.com/rikoshi

Hey folks,

I don't really post here much, but elsewhere on the Internet I'm pretty active, and if you've been following me those places, you probably know that things haven't been going so well for me lately.

Really, things haven't been going so hot for the last several years, but these last two have been the real kicker, and the last few months in particular have me looking at declaring bankruptcy (this is something I'm already receiving some help with, and not the reason for my making this post).

A lot of people are curious what's been going on. I'm sort of a private person to begin with, so getting into personal finances for the world to see isn't really my style, but at this point the situation is bad enough that it's basically overtaken my life, and since it's impossible for me to ignore it's kind of impossible to keep it bleeding through into my day-to-day. So I guess it's better for folks to know what's going on than be in the dark, wondering.

Anyway, long story short, my day job never paid all that great; I made it by, paycheck to paycheck, but that was all I was ever able to muster. I had some debt that still followed me around from earlier in life, but it was all manageable. Had a great credit score, if nothing else. Anyway, then I got laid off, which I sort of saw as a blessing in disguise.

I spent a year collecting unemployment while looking for work in my career path, which was mostly enough to get by on, but not enough to put any savings away. Eventually, an old business contact of mine got me into freelance translating, which paid more money than I'd ever seen in my life by quite a bit.

Anyhow, that initial excitement carried me along for a few months, but then one of my big clients went bankrupt and so a lot of work dried up. I was able to find more, naturally, but breaking equilibrium when you work freelance is really rough. Without getting into too much detail, most of the time, you don't get paid for a job until at least a month after it's done. So if I start a job in early July, and that job goes two months, I probably don't see money until October.

Now, when October DOES roll around, I see a LOT of money, but the issue then is what to do if I get that job in early July and don't have money already: I've got three months before I'm likely to see any money, even though I know it's on the way. Suffice it to say, this meant borrowing a lot of money from friends in order to get through those 'gaps' whenever work would dry up from time to time (which, sadly, it did).

(People would ask me, at the time, why I didn't work part-time in the meantime to have cash on hand, to which I can assure you all that I wouldn't have had time given all of the other work I was doing.)

Anyway, not an ideal situation by any stretch. I was lucky enough to have some friends who could support me during the drier periods, and some of them are unlucky enough that, due to circumstances more recently, I haven't been able to do that yet, and that's what brings me to the nail in the coffin.

After several straight years of pulling far less work than expected in translation, I finally landed a major and very exciting gig. Career-wise, I'd never seen anything like it, and anyone in my shoes or even standing on the sidelines would've seen it for the amazing opportunity it was. This was the big break I'd been waiting for.

Except it didn't work out that way. After eight solid months of work, I wound up seeing just over two weeks' of pay. Those of you with office jobs or the like, imagine what working for over seven months straight without getting paid would be like for your financial situation. Now imagine that you're planning on getting that seven months at the very end anyway, but then at the last minute everything goes, "Wait, no, you actually don't get anything." That's essentially what happened to me.

(Some of you who know me personally might know what opportunity I'm talking about here; I am asking you, please, PLEASE do not name names here in the comments. What happened happened. It's no one's fault, I'm not mad at anyone, it was just a business venture that didn't work out as well as all parties involved had hoped. No one's in breach of contract, I'm not owed anything I haven't been paid, etc.)

Anyway, that brings us to now, really. I've spent the last month buried under a mountain of work while what little was left of money has dwindled away. I talk about how I don't have money, and I think people assume I mean "I can't afford to buy nice things or go on vacations," but what I actually mean is, "I haven't paid my medical insurance in months, I'm behind on my rent, and bills beyond that got forgotten about a long time ago."

Being this broke is terrifying. It's terrifying and it's very upsetting. I've been on the line for a few years now, in a near-constant panic about this sort of thing, and now that I'm in the middle of it my emotional ability to cope with it is almost completely gone. I get angry and lash out a lot; I feel beyond helpless because none of my attempts to fix the situation have worked (and, in fact, things have just gotten perpetually worse). And of course since people see me upset and don't know what's going on behind the scenes, they (perhaps rightly) assume that my being upset is the problem, not a symptom.

People tell me to cheer up, that I shouldn't blame myself, that things'll turn around. Well, I don't blame myself, but that doesn't make the reality of eight months of work coming to nothing any less devastating, either emotionally or financially, and simply keeping my chin up and hoping for the best doesn't change the fact that I'm behind on the basic expenses for things that keep me alive and with a roof over my head while having no real solid idea when I'll see money again (I'm booked through with work until February and have multiple outstanding invoices, but money several months in the future does me no good when I still need money several months in the past). And this isn't meant to be critical of anyone legitimately trying to be encouraging; I'm just trying to explain where I'm coming from and why the encouragement doesn't really work so well.

I'm not here to panhandle or to ask to borrow money; declaring bankruptcy is my one real option here, and my number one goal right now is to get stable enough to make that happen (god, how fucked up is that?). I just know a lot of people have made the case that people need to know what's going on, so there it is, in perhaps a bit too rambly a form.

(There's a lot more to the story, like being arrested and being treated for a chronic health condition but I tried to focus on the big points. There are a lot of little cuts that added up to make this all so much more complicated than what's here.)

Thanks for listening. And I hope this helps people understand a bit better just why I'm so scared and upset all the time.


tl;dr version: I'm bankrupt now because I was in a bad financial situation and then wound up not getting paid for over seven months of work; maybe it's not a fair situation, but it is what it is

Hey folks!

I have a new, non-furry but still "Summerhill"-related story up on my Patreon now! It's free to read, so if you're interested, go ahead and click:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/septe.....-bonus-3584140

Hey everyone!

In (hopefully) exciting news, today I've launched my new Patreon campaign for my upcoming novel titled Stargazer!

This is a sequel to 2013's Summerhill, continuing where the first book left off, this time featuring Katherine as the protagonist as she and Summerhill continue their adventures together. You'll learn more about Katherine's bizarre past, including how she got from New Zealand to a cruise ship in the middle of nowhere, her history with the Consortium, and what the deal is with that grandfather of hers she keeps mentioning.

There's even a bonus story up there right now, featuring Tek and the planet Rydale after the events of the first book, and you can go ahead and read that right now, because...

All story and artistic content on this Patreon will be FREE. You don't need to pay to view the novel or any side-stories I post, but being a supporter will ensure that I can safely devote the time away from my normal job to put the time and effort into this new book, and possibly other future writing efforts if it works out well!

Please go ahead and check out my Patreon page for more info, and if you can contribute even a tiny bit to the campaign, every little bit helps! Thanks so much for your time and consideration and for being fans of mine all these years!

https://www.patreon.com/rikoshi

Hey folks,

So, this is a first for me, and it's admittedly a little bit of an experiment, but I've decided to open up for story commissions. Also, with the Christmas season upon us, I thought it might be a good time to give it a go, in case anyone was in a gift-giving mood or anything like that.

Since writing, unlike visual art, is harder to break up into easy categories of complexity (such as sketch, lineart, flat colors, shading, etc.), and since story complexity isn't a linear function of story length, hopefully the breakdown I've got here makes sense to folks. Of course, if you need any sort of clarification on anything to see what best fits your idea, feel free to ask!

Here's the breakdown:
$25: Vignette (basically a scene, somewhere in the ballpark of 2000 words, covering a basic idea that's more like a sketch than a full story)

$75: Simple Short Story (multiple scenes, more in depth with framing, probably in the neighborhood of 5000 words, more like Structural Integrity

$200: Developed Short Story (stronger arc, probably more side characters and a stronger theme throughout, in the 10,000~12,500 range or thereabouts, like my story Trading Wishes, or something slightly shorter but more elaborate, like Shadows of Novoprypiatsk)

Please keep in mind that these categories are just guidelines; it's certainly possible that a really complicated short story still might only come out to 8000 words, in which case it might fall closer to the Developed end of the pay scale; also, depending on what sort of story you're looking for (for instance, a historical fiction piece that requires me to do a fair bit of research) that might also incur extra costs that we can negotiate on an individual basis.

Also, for the month of December, I'm also offering Guaranteed Christmas Delivery (of a sorts) for those of you who want to surprise someone with a story gift (or those of you who are just impatient). If you want in on that, it's +$25 for a Simple story and +$50 for a Developed (Vignettes are short enough that it's a non-issue). Otherwise, I'll do my best to ballpark when your story will be finished, but keep in mind that I do work full time and it may not be a lightning-fast turnaround.

No 'slots' or anything; I'm going to just take commission requests until I feel that I'm at my comfortable limit of work to take on, and if things work out well, I'll probably reopen later on!

If you're interested, shoot me a note here, or email me at rikoshi at the gmail. If you're curious about what I will and won't write, well... if it's something weird (and if you're asking for something weird, you'll know), ask, and we can see what/if I can do, but obviously I reserve the right to turn down any concept that I'm not comfortable writing.