Lucky Day

The day started out with me sending off my blog post and getting the child off to school. It was a beautiful day so I then slacked off a bit and took the dog for a long walk.  I then sat at my computer and did some job searching, wrote about customer service in Killer Teacup and did a run to the store. While I was there I got a text from my husband that he was leaving early and taking me to a movie. The day was shaping up pretty good, it got even better when I got home and scratched the ticket..I made a profit, not a lot, but it was still a winner.

I checked my email and found out that one of the reps I was working with had been going to bat for me and trying to get me a job with another engineering company (thank  you Jack). So over all it wasn’t too bad of a day.

The only down part of the day is that I found I have been outbid on two jobs writing jobs I applied for. It had come down to two of us and the other person was the lower bid. Unfortunately I live in North America and making $5 an hour is not going to help me survive. I am just going to have to hang in there and see what else comes along.

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Insane day

Today was totally insane, not because of the job hunt, just because of the youngster I had to haul around with myself today. I’ve never been a kid person and I never imagined having one myself. Still not sure how that happened. I have all the respect in the world for teachers and anyone that has to deal with these minuscule demons on a regular basis. I have only one, how can they handle five or ten?

I went into the store and every time I stopped to look at something he was off down a different aisle because something caught his attention. I had to deal with tantrums, embarrassing nose picking, and repeated demands of “I want,” and that was all within 15 minutes. If the child had actually decided to behave I was even going to cave in and take him to the dreaded McDonalds where he could fill himself on junk food and climb like an idiot. Thanks to his behavior I was spared that torment (thought I did miss out on my Shamrock shake).

I bow down to those that handle these miscreants, I honor those who actually enjoy it (even if I personally think you are a glutton for punishment)

As for the writing end of things, I did manage to get my one job done….but if I had more than that, I don’t think I would have managed

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Everything is coming up Roses

YES! Today I officially got my first paying job and it came through a site I didn’t have much hope for, Peopleperhour.com. They are out of the U.K. and deal with mostly European and Middle East jobs. The gentleman I am working with has given pretty clear instructions, yet he is giving me some creative room as well. He jots down some notes and I create a blog entry, I am not using his words verbatim, but the general idea and so far he likes what I have given him. And he’s offered me some further work!

Until this chance came along I was going to prostitute my skills just to get a few things under my belt and have experience of some sort. Now I don’t need to, I just turned down an offer of $1 for a 500 word post that I was seriously considering. I don’t see piles of cash in my future, I don’t even see enough to pay the bills, but it’s a start. This is by no means a full-time job it might fizzle into nothing, or it might end up being my pocket-money while I hold down a full-time job (if and when I find one).

Even if it turns out that I really don’t like doing this, at least I tried something different and stepped outside of my normal scope.

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The hardest thing…

… about trying to pick this up is my family. Every time I sit down to look for work my four-year old comes running in with something I NEED to do for him right now, or if I wait until he is in bed then my husband complains that I am ignoring him. Today I got the “Its Saturday, you’re not supposed to work on the weekends” yet all week long I  continually hear about how we are short on funds and he wants me to get back to work. He doesn’t seem to understand that he makes more than enough for us to live comfortably, maybe not a comfortable as before, but more comfortable than many people we know. Even if he is laid off tomorrow we are not going to be starving. If I short sell the vehicle in the garage I have  a minimum of two months mortgage, and some of my other collections could probably get us at least three months more.

unfortunately my husband lives in the moment, luckily I do not. Months before I was laid off I had seen the potential and I figured out how to survive on worst case scenario. The hardest part would be making him give up some toys, but then again I am the type that could survive in the woods for a month with nothing more than the clothes on my back and a good knife. He can’t even seem to keep track of his 401K. Luckily I am planning the retirement for us both and thankfully it is many years away. I have nest eggs stashed all over the place and most of them are growing…the one thing I have been avoiding is the stock market on everything except my last employers 401K and I only participated in that because they had a match program (I’m not about to turn down free money)

Oh well, hopefully he realizes that I am serious about this. Yes I am still trying to find a full-time job, but in this economy I don’t think its going to happen any time soon. My chances have declined even further with a couple of nearby plants announcing that they are leaving the state, that puts a few thousand more in competition with me. In the meantime all I can do is sit here and type and apply.

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Ahh Sweet Friday

Today is Friday, not a lot going on the job circuit. There is a gentlemen in England looking for a blogger, so correspondences are being passed between us to see if an agreement can be decided upon.

And that last sentence was harder to type than it should have been. While perusing blogs an interesting one came to my attention  Here’s another challenge for everyone… by The Hobbler. The challenge is to not use  the singular pronoun referring to oneself. Thus far it has been a creative challenge.

Only a short post today as it is getting exceedingly difficult to write in the first person without using that particular word. There is also bread in the oven that must be attended to and my stepson is coming over.

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There is hope

Back to Odesk today. I worked on my profile, did a few tests and then applied for a few job. I haven’t been offered a job through Odesk yet, but I like the fact that I am actually getting responses from the employers. This means that I am not out of the running yet. I have filled out applications for five jobs and gotten responses from four of them, I like those odds. They are much better than what I have gotten out here in the physical world.

Ghostblogger approved one of my submitted articles today and currently has it up for sale, the other article was rejected for formatting. I am not sure what the issue is with the format because it looks good on my computer, I might have to fire up one of the other systems and see if a different operating system views it differently. (I have encountered that before).

So far I have been managing to write one article per day. Yesterday I was clueless for anything to write on so I opened the Thesaurus and grabbed the first word I saw, ‘Bad’. It is actually more difficult than you would think to come up with a few hundred words based around a word, but I managed to force it out. Today’s was easy, it was about one of my favorite products. I have a few other articles I have written as demo articles, but I can’t put those as public at least until they are rejected. For now they can stay in my private portfolio.

I also got the hard copies of my professional resume today. I don’t need a professionally done resume, I have been told that mine is pretty good. I only got it done because it was part of my severance package and this way I have two separate versions I can send out. If I don’t get a bite on one style who knows, they might  on the other.

 A. Carvelli

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Another Day Another Dollar

Another day another dollar. I earned a few dollars today through Mturk, unfortunately they weren’t blogging. These were surveys and evaluations. This time of year you frequently find College programs collecting data so someone can finish their product or thesis. You can actually find quite a bit of piecework through that site. The one problem with Mturk is that you have to be picky, many of the job listed just aren’t worth what they are offering. After all, I am not going to write a 700 word article for someone-elses blog and let them pay me only a dollar. Its’ just not worth the time or effort.

 On the flip side though I have managed to apply to jobs on Odesk that actually took the time to respond to me. One of them brought to light that I really need to create another Facebook page that would allow me to keep my private and work lives separate. I suppose that will be my next project today.

In the general job hunt, the well is still dry. I have updated my Linkedin profile and cleaned up my resume again. I think I need to start stretching out a little further, I can’t remain unemployed forever.

A. Carvelli

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Day Two

Well here we are on Day Two and I am writing again. I did some more research this morning and found several sites that might be useful to me, I also applied for some small piecework jobs on Craigslist. If any of the sites pan out as decent then I will start posting them on here, but in the meantime I might as well keep them to myself.

There are millions of bad sites out there I found one recently that looked very good. You submitted random original articles and they went in a database where people could buy them on a per word basis. I submitted a few to it that are still pending review, I also submitted two ‘rewritten pages’ that I had previously out on a web site and their software instantly rejected those. When their software quickly rejected them I had hope that this site was good. However when I looked deeper into this site I find clues that its a pretty dead site. Their copyright and Terms of Service are two years old, last activity on their twitter or facebook account was sometime last year. I don’t have a lot of hope for this anymore.

One useful piece of information I have found is that I need writing samples, and not just things written on this blog as blog entries. I need to write reviews, and random topic items so that I create a portfolio of marketable items. I also need to keep a selection of written articles off of the internet so that I can submit them as original writings. So on top of doing this blog I will set myself a goal of writing one article a week to add to my offline portfolio.

Day One

Okay this is where I begin writing about my journey to being a ghost writer. I have been dabbling in the field for a quite a bit, picking up odd little job for pennies a word as I write full article blogs for people. It started as a way to add money to my sons bank account, now I am going to look into this more seriously as I am currently unemployed. I have always enjoyed writing and with today’s job market making employment options look bleak I figured that I might as well try for this.

The first step I took was looking up information online. One interesting site I found was http://ghostwriterdad.com/ this offered some interesting information and a free 30 day course which I signed up for. I figured that if nothing else it would be one more email in my trash bin, however the articles he sends do seem to be rather informative. Some of the stuff is simple common sense, but seeing it laid out by someone else is nice

The second step I took was starting this blog. If I want to write, then I should start writing. Even if I have nothing to say I am still going to attempt to post something in here so I can keep myself in the habit of writing. Wish me luck