The "good news" I mentioned 2 weeks ago? Erase it. All gone.
I don't know how it happened, I was just involved in preparing documents, concepts, and helping managing the web site and social networking stuff, but despite both sides signing contracts it seems that we were both talking past each other.
It boiled down to this ... THEY assumed that we had funding for the project, and were happy to provide their talent with us carrying the risk ... WE assumed that they were going to be involved in bringing in funding. So, we officially get a week into the deal, and both sides are looking at each other for the money. No money. I mean, it's not like THEY don't have money, their side practically wipes their butts with hundred dollar bills, but they are totally uninterested in funding the project, and we somehow did not get wind of this before this blew up last week.
We had two days this week to pull together a whole multi-level plan, schedule, etc., and just killed ourselves doing this (it still wasn't everything they'd asked for), but it still hinged on other money coming into the deal, so the deal was dead.
Personally, we have been working on the assumption that I would be seeing some money being paid to me by the end of April. This is now not functional. And what residual monies that I did have at one point were pretty much wiped out in the economic collapse. So, despite my "new job" with out "new company", I'm going to be having to hit the bricks, at least looking for something temporary for the short term. Nice economy for that.
We still have some on-going projects, one that I'm the principal on, which will be continuing, but they're all far away from being income-producing. We have 3-5 projects in play, which are likely to be being pushed forward by their supervisors, but the one I have is the best bet for us to have a "proof of concept" for the over-all concept we're pushing.
I just hope we can keep things together as far as not losing our condo. Frankly, I don't know where we could move and have less expenses, as pricey as our assessment and taxes are here, we still only are paying off the equity loan that we took out to buy The Wife her tutoring franchise (since closed) several years back. If we took those three numbers and added them together, we'd still be paying more to rent the same amount of space in most of the areas of the city in which we'd be comfortable living. We don't have a car (or two), so the concept of moving out to a suburban situation, even if the housing was cheaper, would still involve a whole extra category of expense.
And, of course, the dollars would have to come from somewhere.
At this point, I'm pretty much down to hoping that I will suddenly, uncharacteristically, become "lucky" and find a job that will pay me enough to keep us afloat and won't grind me down too much. It's going to be hard, because I've really liked my job (minus the not getting paid bit) over the past year and a half, and it will be very difficult to shift from that to something which "I can do".
Bleh ... very, very down today.