Years ago I took a fiction-content-editing course and met some of the greatest people ever, almost all of them much younger than I was.

Among them was Lori Puma, a beautiful young woman with a sharp mind and the sort of kindness that compels a person to walk across a crowded room between lectures and talk to that old guy who looks a bit lost.

Lori listened patiently as I droned on about my old friend Mike Reed, God rest his soul, a quadriplegic day trader that I helped write a trading book back in the early 2000s. It sold well due to his ideas and experience. All him, not me, because I was a trading rookie at the time, and still am relative to those vanishingly rare individuals who can make a living day trading (as opposed to the other 99+ % of us who lose money, quit, rinse and repeat).

Soon after I met Lori in content-editing school, she found out she had a “benign” brain tumor, a meningioma. It wasn’t malignant, invasive, or able to metastasize, but it was big.

Huge, if we’re being frank. Just look at her MRI above.

The surgeons removed all of it, thank Heavens, but Lori has been struggling towards full recovery ever since. And it’s been years.

All through these long horrific years she always hangs in cheerfully despite the constant barrage of new and old troubles… painful vision problems, speech problems, sensitivity to sounds, sensitivity to light, constant exhaustion, trouble dealing with crowded areas, and other things that I’d never imagined could result from a “benign” meningioma. (We pathologists work in a patient-free realm of ignorance.)

Lori suffered other types of pain, any one of which would have overwhelmed me completely. And my extremely hot looking wife of 46 years thinks I’m “no sissy to pain.” It’s all relative. Compared to Lori Puma, I’m a sniveling sniveler that snivels. (That’ll be our little secret, huh?)

Lori has made steady progress, thank the stars and beyond. I’ve watched from afar, awestruck by her inner strength and miraculous humor. She carries a transcendent glow in most of her videos.

Not the latest one, though. This moment in time is extra tough.

And really overall, she inhabits a world that’s still distant from the complete recovery I’ve been praying for, the life she lived when I first met her in that remarkable fiction-content-editing class with all those wonderful people that I miss to this day.

Living in the wake of her brain tumor is only part of the challenge Lori handles, the other part is this, Lori is very poor now. She’s among the WORKING poor, though. And the term “working” is a vast and trunkless leg of understatement…

She hammers away, hustles, creates, tests, ships, calls, schedules her time with clients, teaches one-on-one, content edits novels, gives public speeches, recovers from exhaustion every day, and then dives back in relentlessly to do it all again and again. She out-works most people with a regular job and regular hours.

For years on end, Lori has worked this way to build her reputation and her fiction content-editing business, ignoring the headwinds and staring down her poverty.

Her business has not turned the corner and paid the bills just yet, not even close. But someday it will rise into profitability and stay there because she keeps on keeping on, as Dylan put it, with the grit of a champion.

Folks, this woman is a World Class Champion.

This month Lori faces the daunting reality of being five hundred dollars short on rent alone. Forget food and the rest. That is a pile of money, and it will take something beyond coincidence to pay her bills this month.

But don’t worry, the very real fact that you’re reading this is not a coincidence…

She’s not going to be homeless come July because she works hard and humbly allows others like you and me to help her survive. She WILL NOT be thrown out on the streets.

Together with me now, please click the link below and help Lori. Give her any amount, big or small because…

Those of us who have not yet struggled to pay rent and buy food do not grasp what a major lift just five dollars can be, let alone fifty, five hundred, or a monthly commitment.

Lori Puma is my friend. I bet she’s your friend too in some version of Baseline Reality, Heaven, or whatever else we might call it.

Let’s show ourselves what we’re actually here for.

How about you and I help Lori make rent this month, OK?

Click here, it’s easy: https://gofund.me/c6512bff4

And if you’re a fiction writer, for the love of God, click over to her website and open your mind all the way. Lori Puma can help your fiction writing business in many ways, some of which you may not even know exist. Here’s her business website: https://loripuma.com/ !!!

…

Nonlocal Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD