Writing Community: Please Act to Help a Fellow Author

Folks, I read about author Arianne “Tex” Thompson’s friend Kristen at Tex’s blog post of April 5, 2016. If you haven’t read Tex’s moving post yet, please do…then come back here, as I have some words.

OK. I’m going to take it that you’ve gone there, read Tex’s post, and are ready for my thoughts.

Tex’s friend Kristen Coster is a fellow writer. She’d worked hard to get several degrees, and had found a job she’d loved, teaching classics to kids. Then, one day, a classroom projector casing fell on Kristen, and her life inextricably changed.

So, one day, Kristen was poor but hard-working, writing up a storm, teaching the classics, petting her cat (when her cat would let her, anyway, as it sounds from Tex’s post that Kristen’s cat is one of the world’s worst-behaved cats imaginable). And the next, Kristen was unemployed, with disabling headaches, having to walk with a cane, no longer being able to drive, and worst of all, being unable to read most of the time much less write.

This could happen to any one of us, folks. And even those of us, like me, who are struggling mightily in this economy have to find some way to help Kristen right now.

Because she is one of us.

She’s a fellow author. She is creative. She needs to regain her strength, and her health, and her life. She needs to keep her ill-tempered cat by her side, be able to afford her needed medicines, be able to stay in her apartment, be able to do everything she needs to do to keep mind, body and soul together in the hopes that she can claw all the way back from this terrible tragedy that has befallen her.

No, you may not have heard of Kristen before. No, you may not have heard of Tex Thompson, either. But you probably have heard similar stories from friends, and maybe quietly helped them in their hours of need with food, medicine, shelter…most people have good hearts, and want to help those who most deserve it.

Kristen obviously is in this category. She needs your help.

So, writing community: Will you help her now? Will you act?

If so, go right now to Kristen’s Patreon page and help her. Anything will do.

Do it for yourself, for your friends, for your fellow writers. And remember — just because this world is often cold and cruel, that doesn’t mean we need to be. (Now, I’m hoping that someone out there can recommend a good lawyer to Kristen who lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Because it surely seems like she needs one!)

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Author’s Afterword: In case you’re wondering, I plan to give Kristen a little money just as soon as I get another paycheck in. Being a little-known writer and editor, those can be few and far between. But I will help Kristen financially down the road, just as I’m doing my best now to let the wider writing world know that she’s there, she’s in great need, and someone should help her. Right. Freakin’. Now.