I linked to this a while ago, but Leonard Pierce offers a service where he will email you a story every month, along with various other services (see here for the full list).

I’m blogging about this again, because I noticed (only a month or so late — I’ve not been keeping up with social media well enough) that he’s had medical trouble (which he’s tweeted about on his publicly accessible twitter, so I don’t think there’s a problem with mentioning this). He’s a freelance writer with no insurance, living in Texas, so this is not a good thing for him, financially.

I’ve known Leonard online for about eight years, through LiveJournal and Twitter, and he was the first person to commission me to write something for a venue other than my own blog, so I would like to see things go better for him. But more to the point, his stories are genuinely extremely good pieces of work. I link to his work a lot from this site, usually to his opinion pieces, but he’s as good a humorist as anyone out there, and he’s also *very* good at a certain kind of first-person vernacular narrative — some of his stuff reminds me a little of Faulkner or Damon Runyon. I think people who like the things I like will enjoy them a lot.

Subscribe to his stories. They’re worth it.

Also, if you’re an American citizen, and you haven’t been disenfranchised by the various new Jim Crow voter ID laws, please vote for a non-Romney candidate on Tuesday, so that when I hear that people I know in your country are ill, my first thought will no longer be “how’s (s)he going to cope financially?” but will be for their health.