I’m going to post a proper post tomorrow, but for today I’m going to signal-boost someone else. My friend Matthew Rossi needs help.
You can read the details here, but the short version is: his wife needs medication to stay alive, and the Alberta healthcare system won’t pay for that medication. Both he and his wife are disabled and unable to work full-time, and Matthew has to earn a living from his writing.

Now, there *is* a GoFundMe — which was originally set up for *Matthew’s* medical treatment (he has progressive diabetic retinopathy), and both I and Matthew would be grateful if you donated something to that, but that’s a short-term thing. What they really need is for him to build a writing career, and the only way for him to do that is for people to pay him for his writing.

Now, I wouldn’t recommend people do that if his writing didn’t deserve paying for, but I can honestly say that I can’t imagine any of my friends or readers *wouldn’t* like his stuff. When I first started blogging, there were three people whose writing convinced me that blog essays could be an interesting form, and my online voice is, to this day, a poor imitation of them. Those three people were Andrew Rilstone, Brad Hicks, and Matt. I don’t know if he’d see it in there, but *I* can definitely see a link between the thing I wrote yesterday about Strange Fruit and his pseudo-historical essays. If you like my writing, the chances are at least some of what you like comes from him.

He’s also an incredibly good person — one of the best I know. I’ve known him for a dozen or so years now, and while we’ve not always been close (life gets in the way of long-distance friendships), there *have* been times we’ve been close, and during those times he’s been *incredibly* supportive. He’s been there for me at times when I needed someone, and in ways that mean that I credit him, at least in part, for me still being alive and married.

So if you like my continued existence or my writing, you’d probably like him, is what I’m saying.

If you want to support his writing career, the best way is to buy his books. Unfortunately the ebooks are Kindle-only, but his two novels at least are also in paperback.

The novels are the first two in a series of young adult fiction involving shoggoths, vampires, and other such weirdness, but written with a perception and intelligence rare to the genre. The two ebooks of essays are wonderful essays in historical imagination, and would I think appeal to anyone who liked Robert Anton Wilson’s writing.

(The fifth book, Things That Never Were, is also extremely good, but I don’t know that he gets royalties from that like he does for the others — it was trad-published a long time ago. Buy it last.)

You can also back him on Patreon. I’m a backer (at the lowest level — a good chunk of my own income at the moment comes from Patreon, so at the moment I can’t afford to spend much on backing other people) and he’s one of the better-value people to back — you get downloads of his novels, bonus posts, and other things.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that. Buy some good books by a good writer.