Dear Reader:

That about sums it up for Writer's Cramp these days. It's broke; back against the wall, while yesterday it was surviving hand to mouth, today its hand can't find its mouth.

It's been a long, hard, cold, nasty and sometimes brutal winter. It's been so cold, in fact, that many of us have preferred to hibernate in our warm cozy lairs rather than do any work that would drag us into the cold cruel realities of the hoary season. Like read through reams of submissions and get magazines out when they're expected. But it's getting harder and harder to pull these publications together and not just because of the weather.

Nobody likes a panhandler sticking a tin cup under their noses and begging for coppers for fish head stew or whatever editors eat these days. It's plain embarrassing to see someone reduced to that level of necessity. In fact, we'd rather close our eyes to it than admit we can actually help. But still thousands of readers have accessed the content on Writer's Cramp with the perfect and very real expectation of getting it free of cost. A safe, warm familiar place on the Web where if one wishes, one can click the Donate Button and show his thanks. Would that that were the case.

Editorializing about panhandling is just as abhorrent, isn't it? Who wants to visit his or her favorite Internet publication, expecting to read another crop of fresh new stories, poetry, essays and articles, just to be confronted by a ragged editor with the audacity, the naked presumption, to hold his hand out to us, palm up, expecting us to offer a donation for something we've been enjoying freely for these past five years? Well apparently nobody wants to be subjected to that kind of embarrassment.

But this is the reality of Writer's Cramp. It can no longer afford to sustain itself, nor can it freely offer you the level of literary and genre content it has consistently produced over the years. The magazine is simply too big and costly now to remain an altruistic venture. Publishers must expect a small return on even such a not for profit offering as WC. Editors must be able to work free of the fear of looming rent payments and grocery bills. We cannot expect our staff to give their efforts, as in the past when Writer's Cramp was newly on the Internet, without expectation of at least a subsistence recompense.

With only one small disposable income slated to the augmentation of all of WC's efforts over the past five years, the everyday functioning of the Magazine is suffering through delays in editing time available on a volunteer basis, and design, coding, formatting and graphics production schedules are narrowed to only one or two days free time per issue—as well the basic cost of hosting and managing the Magazine are all lining up on the negative side of the equation. Times are becoming desperate for Writer's Cramp.

Last year we introduced an advertising schedule for the magazine and the year before that a donation function was added to assist in maintaining the Website. Sadly, both of these conveniences have been largely ignored by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site. That's right over 300,000 hits this year alone, multiplied by five years that's over a million and a half hits since the inception of Writer's Cramp! And of those people visiting and enjoying the work of scores of exciting and creative writers, many of whom have gone on to sign lucrative contracts with outside publishing houses, only a handful have actually donated to help keep the site viable. And—you want to talk about real embarrassment—most of those have been the same contributors who give you their stories and poetry free of charge.

The simple reality of the situation is that Writer's Cramp will not survive if its readership continues to ignore the basic nature of survival. Sustenance enables survival and without it, the entity dies. In the immortal words of Audry Junior, "Feed Me!"

It's not a handout Writer's Cramp needs, it's support. Support through advertising, through simple donations of thanks for the impeccable content always offered in the magazine; purchase of digital art through the Gallery and the new e-Books we offer so that in future we can offer you more. More e-Books and eventually books in print.

Enjoy Writer's Cramp as you always have, but click the PayPal button or visit the Support Page and show your appreciation by allowing that a donation is not a handout.