I wrote a story yesterday called Blankets - one of the last few that I had been working on for Sky Fell Down - which is (a little bit) about people who are more than happy to stand idly by while the world falls to pieces within arms reach of them.
I put the full stop where it belonged (at the end), lit a cigarette because that's the law when you finish a story and dropped a pair of headphones on to bury myself in an avalanche of My Chemical Romance because the only way to silence the voices in your head that all want to talk out loud about the next thing you have to do, is to drown them out.
And while I was sitting there at The Big Table, a thought occurred to me. That I should do something right now - right this very second - to not be one of those people who talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. This ball of dirt we're living on? It's full of puddles. More puddles than dirt in fact and right now, it's getting fucked over.
Reason? Bare knuckle fighting to make ends meet and survive probably. There's also greed, commerce and a hundred other things I don't know about or understand, but I don't need to. What I do know is that sometimes, you have to stand up and start throwing stones into the water to even begin to build a dam.
The people at TerraMar have got a handle on it, there is more work to do than we will ever know but that doesn't mean the work shouldn't be started. Go take a look, there are plenty of creatures you can publicly get behind on there but the hammerhead shark is such a wonderful freak of nature, it had my name all over it.
You can throw some useful, cold, hard cash into the hammerhead fund here, join me and publicly declare that you give a fuck. It doesn't go directly to saving the shark itself - that would be impossible - it's a huge global project to simply do something constructive to help make this ball of dirt and puddles a better place to live on in the future.
Small gestures aren't really in my nature. Or useful for that matter.
Aside from this initial toss of some coin into the wishing well, the best I can do right now - at least until some incredible stroke of good fortune falls into my lap - is commit to handing over a percentage of my monthly writing earnings to them.
So that's what I'll do.
Ghislaine Maxwell explains much better than I ever can right here:
More later... I have to write something for somebody.