Thank you--and an update

Thank you all for your incredibly generous contributions to my GiveSendGo campaign. We raised over $3,000, which gets me out of the jam I was in thanks to Karen’s medical expenses and my dental/jaw issues. I’m hopefully going to get botox early next week for the jaw tension.

I had paused my telling of the disastrous past year to regale you with stories of my nearly-as-disastrous childhood, and while like any novelist I enjoy keeping my readers in suspense, I figured I probably owe you at least a brief update on my current situation before I jump back to Punta Gorda.

My relationship with Karen is on hiatus. Probably the same kind of hiatus as the Based Book Club. Between the language barrier, age difference, cultural differences, trying to maintain a relationship across 3,000 miles, and the never-ending health crises (and consequent financial troubles), we never really had a chance to have a normal relationship. One part of me thought, “If we can get through this, we can survive anything.” But the truth is, life doesn’t work that way. Daily life with another person has its own challenges, and the odds were always stacked against our relationship working.

The breakup wasn’t easy for me, particularly since I’m in a foreign country where I don’t really know anybody else, but I’m doing OK. Really. I had a sense for a while that things were coming to a close, so it wasn’t a huge shock. And the nice thing about having your life fall apart repeatedly over several years is that it makes you resilient. Or cynical. Anyway, it’s one of those two.

Helping Karen with her family’s medical problems was never contingent on our relationship working out. She was somebody I cared about, and I just couldn’t sit by and let her suffer. That said, I don’t have the resources to continue to support an ex-girlfriend indefinitely, even in Ecuador. Keeping Karen’s family alive for a year nearly broke me, and I simply can’t do it anymore.

In any case, I can’t legally stay in Ecuador much longer. I will be returning to the US for a few days to send out some books for the Ransom’s Law Kickstarter and then I’ll be spending two months in Colombia. After that? I honestly don’t know. I hear good things about El Salvador.