All About Me: New Career, New Blog, and hopefully a New Website

Wanring: this post is long winded and can be boring. It is my first post and I am just getting my story out there in case I actually get loyal followers in the future.

I have been told for years that a blog is a great way to market yourself. No matter what kind of creative work people are involved in, supposedly a blog is a perfect way to create a sellable package. This is especially true if the blog gets a lot of hits or a readership following. I have heard that literary agents will be more willing to buy your book if you have a loyal readership and that article writers will be able to obtain more clients.

I do not know if any of this is true, but it can't hurt to try. Besides, about four months ago I bought a website domain name in hopes I could start to market my freelance writing. I even have business cards printed up with the website name. However, the last website design class I took was in 2009. While I was pretty handy with HTML and make an awesome book review website, it has been awhile and I have not gotten around to constructing it.

Part of the reason I have been too busy is my newest career. I am finally able to be a full time freelance writer (as long as my company does not go through another low article period again!). I started freelancing in March of this year with my then-fiance's relative who owns her own freelance company in California. Even though I live in Missouri (telecommuting is one of the benefits of freelancing), I start ghostwriting articles about infertility for her. Not only have I learned everything about infertility to the point I can educate my friends about getting pregnant, I also learned invaluable freelance skills and received amazing advice from my boss.

I hit some financial constraints in late August, about two weeks before I was getting married (which, by the way, is the worst time to realize that you have no reliable source of income). I started getting on freelance job site, bidding madly for long term and short term article assignments. I was chosen as a candidate for a job that required 200 articles a week at $6 per article. I did the math and threw all of my energy into getting the job.

It was not easy. The company has two overseas offices - one in India and one in London. My times for meeting with them on Skype were always off because I did not know which office I was speaking to. There were many times they did not want to hire me, but I campaigned my skills to death. Finally, I learned I got the job the day before I got married. My fiance and I were ecstatic, but I asked him not to tell anyone until after the honeymoon to make sure they did not get restless and offer someone else the job while I was gone.

It was still waiting for me when I got back, and I threw myself into work the day after I returned home. It has had its ups and downs with article availability, but I am making it work. To the point of staying up all night or waking up at four in the morning to be on UK time. This company makes me write about every. Topic. Imaginable. Seriously. Call girl services in Texas, titanium distributors, epoxy flooring, jewelry, furniture, chandeliers, wood distribution from Canada, colleges in India. Everything. All articles are written like subtle advertisements with strict rules.

I still work for the California company writing infertility articles, something I strangely enjoy doing. I also work for CopyPress, an AWESOME freelance site that I would love to work for full time, except they are having a very dry article period. I feel like they have the best model for articles that people will actually read, get viewing hits, and will turn up in the top Google searches.

So freelancing is going well, and I should be writing articles right now. However, when I majored in English in college I wanted to be a novelist or some sort of fiction writer. After I graduated, I realized how that was impossible to do right away and still make a living. I had a lot of odd jobs. Page at a library, infant and toddler teacher at a daycare center, substitute teacher, nanny.

I went back to school a couple months after graduating from MU to be a social studies teacher for middle and high school. I went a nontraditional route with ABCTE, a program that I think is great but just needs a little more work. It provides certification at the middle and high school level in the core curriculum areas for about $1600.

Candidates also have to complete "student teaching" in the form of a supervised teaching position, substitute teaching, or paraprofessional teaching. I chose substitute teaching, and the requirements are very difficult. Not only that, but when I interviewed for full time positions no one took my certification seriously. I realized that Missouri was too new of a state in the program for it to be widely accepted.

I started looking for other full time jobs, but could not find anything. Luckily, freelance came at the perfect time. It was truly meant to happen.

I still want to be a fiction author in some capacity, however. My OneNote is filled with numerous little ideas that will probably never amount to anything. My husband also comes up with great action, suspense, and sci-fi ideas that I have trouble translating into writing. Those genres are really hard for me. I have a ton of projects in the works.

• I started writing a novel when I was in my first year of college that I still think has potential. It just needs a lot of work. It looks at the obsession America has with Hollywood and how we put actors on a god-like pedestal. I have written two drafts of it so far, but need to focus on it more once I get my finances in check. Maybe in a year?
• I also have a short story turned novella turned possible novel that I wrote in my final creative writing class at MU. The topic is about suicide bombing via a cult influence. Classmates really enjoyed it and all said it has potential. My husband likes it a lot and has been helping me make revisions on it. That will probably be my first salable fiction project. 
• A story I wrote in an early creative writing class is about witches. I think it can be a fantasy series, but since the character is 20 and living on her own, I don't know if it can be considered YA. I don't want the traditional character-is-in-school-but-learns-of-the-supernatural-and-suddenly-is-never-in-school-anymore-yet-still-attends-major-events-like-dances-that-always-go-horribly-wrong cannon.
• My husband and I have a great idea for a series of children's books about our Jack Russel-Min Pin mutt girl dog named Charley. She is hilarious and like a person. We came up with an idea while she had fleas of her and a flea becoming friends and going on moral adventures. The setting is our home where we have an awesome walking trail and large wooded back yard. Charley also has many doggie friends that would pop up in the books as archetypes. This can be a very difficult project.
• There is a non-fiction book I am writing about how to make a wedding planning binder. While I was planning my wedding, everyone loved my wedding binder that I helped organize my planning. Even professional vendors were astonished. This will be sold on Kindle at a cheap price so more people can access it. This is more of an informational and side income project as opposed to a serious career move. 

I am so blessed to have a husband who helps me become a better writer every day. He is a firefighter and paramedic and he is wickedly smart. He is an avid reader and a huge movie buff, so he is an expert on plot and dialogue. He has made all of my writing become better with excellent suggestions and huge edits. No matter what writing I give him, he diligently reads it and takes notes so we can talk about it. I think he will be a great collaborator!

That is pretty much everything you could possibly know about me. One of these days I will finish my website with my freelance rates and my fiction projects. Hopefully, I will be able to write some real blog posts soon.

My husband, me, and our dog Charley at our wedding.