You are listening to another Clarksworld magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Welcome to Issue 237 for June 26. Our story is titled The Potential Side Effects of Roleplay

Stimulation Therapy. It is by Claire Jowhuen. Now, before we begin our story, this story, like all of

the rest of our stories and our future stories, are

brought to you by your ongoing support. If you go to the editorial for this month's issue,

Neil talks about potentially asking every person who listens to the magazine and who reads

the magazine to subscribe. And you know why? Because that will help pay the people behind the scenes more.

Now some words from Neal's editorial. This job pays for Neal's health care plan. What's offered by

his wife's employer is insufficient, so he doesn't have a choice there. What he didn't count on

was just how fast those premiums would

rise or that a pandemic would increase the magazine's non-salary expenses or that Amazon would

kill their digital subscription program and leave us scrambling to rebuild. Calling the last five years

challenging would be an understatement, but somehow we've still managed to make a little

progress on pay in that window.

Neil tries to remain positive.

Many people in this community don't believe it's possible to complete the goal we've established.

But the progress we've made suggests it's hard, not impossible.

When we started this magazine, a lot of people said we wouldn't last a year.

Same thing. Hard. Not impossible.

He didn't give up then, and he refuses to give up now.

It's been suggested that we hold a subscription drive to help move this forward.

Our thoughts, well, we've already committed to direct all new revenue towards addressing the compensation.

...