writing skills/profession

blogging for pay


The education blog isn’t live yet at Care2.com, but they were looking for volunteers to write a tolerance piece in the wake of Ft. Hood because the tragedy is bound to reawaken the same sort of anti-Muslim feeling that 9/11 did.

So I volunteered.

I wrote the piece in about 30 minutes, scoured Rob’s hard drive for a photo (and he got the photo credit) and sent it in. It was on their main page last I looked but you can find it and my Sesame Street anniversary piece at this link.

Fenns chapter three is about 300 words from done, so look for it tonight or tomorrow morning. Four is in my head but might follow closely on Sunday.

Otherwise, we are motoring to Jasper tonight and Victoria sometimes on Saturday evening. My voice is shot and Rob is finally admitting he feels like crap, but on the whole we are better than two days ago, so the holiday is on!

Blogging from the Charmin Washroom


This is something The Bloggess would get picked to do because she is weberatti and because she believes public washrooms are zen zones, but apparently Charmin is looking for unknowns to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas manning their Grand Central Station washrooms* and then blogging, tweeting and otherwise letting the known universe in on the wonderliciousness of it all.

This is how toilet tissue is sold in my native land and one more reason to not admit I am from there when we move overseas. That and the whole terrorists might kill me thing.

“It’s pays money,” I told Rob.

“But you have to live in the bathroom, right? It’s a 24/7 thing.”

“They’re paying $10,000,” I repeated the money thing because I didn’t think he’d heard.

“To live in a bathroom that thousands of who knows where they’ve been people are walking in and out of to take care of any private function you can imagine every day for five weeks!”

“For $10,000,” I said – again – “And you get to blog about it and tweet and make YouTube videos.”

“In a bathroom where people piss and shit,” he was really stuck on the negatives. “Do you have to eat in there too?”

“Well, I would imagine they give you breaks,” I said, not really knowing and not really sure. It’s in America after all where “reality” is carried to extremes.

“You want to do this, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, no.” Okay the money, the blogging and the attention would be interesting but there is the whole toilet aspect to consider. He had a good point there. If I were 22, homeless already with no immediate job prospects, this might sound like a better opportunity.

“I’m not going to live in a bathroom in Grand Central Station for 5 weeks,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a family thing,” I said.

“So you want to go to New York for five weeks by yourself?”

Already I can’t picture Rob and Dee for five weeks on their own with me checking in via an iPhone. I think this kind of technological upgrade would be necessary in order to pull this off when you are not a homeless 22-year-old college drop-out without prospects but the Charmin people would have to foot the tech bill or that $10,000 would be eaten by the expense. Which I guess is why they are looking for bloggers as we tend to work for free when we aren’t paying people for the privilege of providing Google with content they can turn around and sell.

“No, I can’t be gone for 5 weeks,” I said, although in the corner of my mind where all outlandish ideas are given more than a cursory once over, wheels are spinning. The three of us in a washroom? Living in Grand Central Station? Better than Balloon Boy Family tv. And it reminds me of one of my favorite childhood novels, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where two kids run away to the Metropolitan Museum and live there for a while. I wonder why Grand Central Station? Why not the Met or MOMA. I could live for 5 weeks in a Museum.

In the end, I decided that even with my allergy reduced sense of smell, I couldn’t live in a public washroom for any length of time. Not even the luxury Charmin potties.

*Updated-Times Square. Luxury porta-potties in Times Square. My bad. Check the link though because they look pretty up-scale. Still, outdoors? They must be looking for people willing to camp. Can you camp in Times Square?

Sure Is Monday


Been stressing all weekend about the new blogging gig at Care2.

“You should never stress about work,” Rob said when I finally voiced my concern that I wouldn’t be able to find a topic for my first post.

“But I can’t work and not be perfect,” I said.

Herein lies my problem, I was raised with a work ethic and the expectation that if I am being paid to work, I need to be damn perfect in the execution of my job – whatever that might be. I have carried this load of crap since the first paying job I had when I was 12 and I was forced to mow our anal retentive neighbor’s lawn two summers in a row. My father, who couldn’t have loathed his job more, believed that there was no half-assing in employment.

I think this must be specific to my particular generation because I haven’t encountered it in those who aren’t technically considered my peer group to the same extent that we seem to be afflicted with it. Maybe it was our parents or something in the food chain or a freakish configuration of planetary bodies, I don’t know, but we are miserable perfectionists. Miserable because we can’t seem to help ourselves despite knowing what a waste of our time it is.

“The hardest thing I ever did was giving up perfectionism,” Rob assured me, but he is the same “reformed” perfectionist who is busily working himself into a knot renovating our home into someone’s dream home because we have no plans to return here after the overseas assignment he is maneuvering towards comes to its ultimate fruition.

Of course I worried to no end. I stumbled across the perfect article in my old home town newspaper this morning which provided the inspiration and link I needed to write my first post – currently awaiting approval. Working for money again has also supplied me with fodder for 50 Something Moms, so blogging is good all around. It was a silly thing to knot up about as it is about as easy for me to not find ideas for writing as it would be to blank my mind and not think. Writing ideas nearly assault me in their quest to be word on screen. Trying to keep pace is more of an issue than anything else.

Oh really, you say. Then why the blog black out over the last week here?

I’ve been writing. That’s why. Blogging is awesome and I don’t think I could ever give it up, but it is a time suck and the sucking usually comes from my off-line writing. I can’t spare it if I want to meet my deadline for rewriting the beginning chapters of the memoir. And while I am on the topic, writing about the dead husband and other related stuff is rather involving. A time suck on the magnitude of black hole.

Things will get back to daily here once NaNoWriMo begins because I am committed to daily doses of fiction, but after that I can’t say. I am literally a hand’s worth of fingers away from post #1000. That’s a lot of blog. Rob thinks I should do something to commemorate the post. I did make note of #500 when it happened, but I haven’t been much for blogversaries and such. You see 1000 posts and I see all the days I could’ve written something in the past 3 and 1/2 years and didn’t. Damned work ethic again.

Today I am exhausted and still have writing and housewifely stuff to do before putting in time on the Dance Mom beat this evening. I haven’t felt this since I stopped teaching – this Monday thing – this weekend lag. Interesting.