I Me Mine

People ask me all the time why I don't make a career of this.

This, this, this... writing thing. Why is it so hard to find a word for this medium? I hate to say "blogger" (omg! you like, have a diary on the computer? that's so dh,md!), but "writer" is taken by people who are on a payroll.

Why don't I quit my day job? Why don't I do something that I love? Why don't I do grant writing? Proposal development? Something that I'm good at? Something that comes almost effortless?

Well, I like my day job. It's useful to me. I'm useful to it. It pays well (enough that I'm not starving). The benefits are better than the pay. And I don't mean the insurance/days off/pension, but that is pretty good too. Better than yours, I'm willing to wager.

Plus I need a hobby, and this is it. A blog takes up way less space than an afghan or a counted cross-stitch kitten mural. I don't ask you why you aren't getting paid to do sodoko. soduko. sodoku. Those number box things.

I'm relatively confident of my writing skills. If you can digest 13% of what I slap up I consider it a compliment and a success. I can only handle about 10% of what is thrown at me throughout my day and I'm doing pretty okay in life.
The rest just kind of slides around the side and falls at my heels as I pass by. I never even know what hit me, nor feel the need to pick up the pieces. Most times.

Enough people read this- or at least subscribe- that I'm guessing that I'm well liked enough to make some cash. But I don't.

I hate blog ads. I hate product reviews. I hate flashy commercial boxes messing up the order of a layout. I hate being given some damn crap under the pretense that I will say nice things about it. I don't even like half of the things that I bought with my own dollars by the time I get them through my front door. I completely understand why people have them, but I just can't handle all that crap all over the only thing that I have total control of. There is too much crap all over everything else in my life.

I just had a therapeutic break through.
I control this. Me. No one is the boss of me over here, unlike the rest of the world where someone is always telling me what to do and how to be. Jakezilla is my anorexia.
I can make jokes about eating disorders here because I can.
Those pants don't make your blog look big. Your fat ass makes your blog look big.
Reason number 847 that I spend so much time here. I'm the biggest thing going around this pop stand and nobody that matters can tell me any different.

I think I could handle getting paid in one hundred word increments, but I'm not in a rush. In the mean time, I'm going to start lifting my archives off of here and rework them and mash them up and then I'm going to pay the good people at Lulu.com to sew them between two covers. Then I'll make a shameless effort to let everyone I know that they can buy something that I wrote and I edited and I published all by myself, on my own terms and I'll get about 4 cents for every copy sold.

And if I make 96 cents from that, maybe I'll look into bumping up my midlife crisis and changing careers.

Bear with me while I do this. I have no idea where to start and I don't want to ask for help. If it's done by the end of the year, that's great. If not, that's great too. If my words lag a bit here, I apologize. If they don't, well, I apologize for that too.

I'll keep you posted.