Taxes, Payments and Everything I Don't Want to Deal With

Taxes are frustrating. Not necessarily having to pay them, but forgetting to submit a new W-9 every time I change my address (which is a lot). But the clever people at the website I rely on for a majority of my income decided not to remind me to change my W-9 until last week. That's all well and good. I'll send you a new one. However, because I was such a bad little writer my payments are being suspended until they receive it. Um... this W-9 is for last year's earnings, not this year. Why suspend 2013 payment? Really. Luckily it's happening during the 10 days I don't have to see bills in my mailbox, but still... it's really annoying when this could have been taken care of months ago.

I don't know what is up with Triond either. This is the place that many of my articles are published, but for now I'm suspending submitting any articles to the website, as well as any promotion I was doing. The reason? A significant drop of earnings (the dreaded CPM) and no explanation. I didn't become aware of it until this last week when I finally published two articles that got hundreds of hits without much promotion and noticed that I didn't start making a penny until the hit count was over 125. Now, six months ago I would have earned a penny starting at 15 hits.

I know we're simply talking pennies here, and I'm not making much more than $0.50 a month, but for the last two months my normal amount of hits hasn't even reached the $0.50 payout. I'm not even sure that anyone got paid in January, though because I didn't meet the payout requirements I knew I wouldn't get paid. The problem I have is that there is no explanation from the management of the site. In the help section, these questions are being asked by others, but either being ignored or deleted.

If the CPM doesn't at least raise back up to where it was before, I may have no other choice than to move my articles, stories and poetry somewhere else. And now that will be much more difficult because they have the dreaded "previously published" label which many other sites similar to the way Triond works will not take them. So, the new article listed at the bottom is officially my last submission to Triond until things look better or I find a site that will give me the the CPM price they promise.

New Articles:
Why Branding is an Investment and Not an Expense

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.