Back To Business

I'm through with whining and sulking. Since this is technically a holiday week (all of you with regular 9-5's know that you're mind probably isn't 100% into your work today through Wednesday) I'm relaxing a little on finding that elusive job outside of the home office, but I'm still actively looking at freelance gigs. I went back to my standard sources, such as Guru. The only problem with that website is that it has changed so much since the last time I accepted a freelance project there. I'm sure that I can still find a job without paying the membership fee, but with only 10 bids a month I'm going to have to be careful about what I choose to bid on.

I'm also looking for new opportunities, but I don't seem to be finding that many. The reason is that after working as a freelancer for nearly four years now, I know what I decent, wage-earning rate per article looks like. And 90% of the job offers out there are well below that rate. If I get desperate, I know I'll want to take them, but I'm not sure that is time well spent, even if it does keep food in my mouth for another week. I'm not really in the habit of encouraging these people to pay so low. That's the #1 reason these people can still get their work produced at super low rates--somebody is always willing to take them.

After all of this, I'm still working on getting down the backlog of books I have to read and writing reviews for all of them. If I got paid to write book reviews (besides being paid in free books, which I'm not complaining about!) I think I would be in heaven. Anyone know of any paying review gigs? I've also done product reviews for a variety of websites, so I'm pretty familiar with the general format. Anyway... I can only hope that kind of a project comes my way.

And of course, since I want to fill my time with as much to do as possible, I'm digging out one of the novels and diving back in. This is the one that I have been working on for about 10 years now, off and on. I got off track dozens of times with this one because of research. I get buried in facts and figures and can't tunnel my way back out. This time I'm going to just lay the story out and put the facts in later, as needed. Maybe that will get everything back on track to produce something worthwhile.