189. Making a living?

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

I'm sure every writer says this to themselves at some point. I'm feeling a bit stressed at the moment, and I'm still trying to fit everything into an increasingly busy schedule, but I'm not seeing all that much in the way of money for my efforts. No, I don't write purely for money, but since I'm unable to work, establishing a set income that I could possibly live off in the years to come is important to me.

Over the years, I've dine every possible thing one could possibly do in order to earn an income from home - in addition to my writing. I've been a virtual assistant. I've had a resume business. I've done telemarketing. I've gone through websites that say you can earn money through them. I always stop before I give these sites any money because most of these sites are known scams.

I was scammed by one just in the last six months. My story with one website Surfjunky is in my archives somewhere here. The catch with the site is you surf so many sites a day and you earn cash for just doing that. Just allow the page to cycle through sites on your browser. Well, I tried it, and I actually racked up about thirty dollars in the first month, but just before payouts were set to go out my account was suspended. A week later it was reinstated because it was their error, but I still was never paid my money owed. Live and learn right? These kind of sites seem to pop up often though, and sometimes I'll try them out to see if they will pan out. I can usually tell within a few days if they will or not.

Well, I tried a few in the last few days. I got sucked in by the thought of some easy money. I spend so much time online what could it hurt? What they said would be an hour a day turned into three or four hours a night. Too much for me to tack onto my already busy schedule. Last night I began taking a serious a look at it, and I looked at it again today, and I am figuring the time spent isn't worth it for what is really pennies a day.

I'm still trying to get things organized with my schedule, and this little trip down make money online lane sort of messed that up a bit. I'm still working on figuring out the set format for my blog over at Media Village. I keep changing up the content a bit. I know once I have a set pattern in place it'll be easier to post there every day as well. I had been doing one big entry with news everyday, but now I might do a bunch of smaller entries and also do a smaller review of the shows I watch each night too. Figuring things out.

Last night once I got frustrated with myself, I decided to see if my muses were totally dead or if they were just being very very quiet. I just had Elmer Fudd in my head saying that! Hah! I went to one of my prompt communities over on live journal and picked up a prompt. 3 minutes to write about love in an elevator. Yes, I had the Aerosmith song start to play in my head when I saw that last night. Now I want to listen to it. HMM! I seem to be stuck on Existentialism on prom night at the moment. I'm the type to put a song on and listen to it on repeat for a half hour straight. Well, in 3 months I had just under 200 words in response to the prompt. I posted the result over on my fiction blog. Link in my sidebar! I'll see if I can find the muses later on tonight and see if they cooperate. I have two shows I review on tonight, so that'll keep me busy. Might need to wait until tomorrow night, but I'll see what happens.

Speaking of shows, my review and recap of last night's Surface is up over on my review blog. You can check that out here. I also made a few changes to my review site yesterday. You can read about those changes here. I'm nearing ten thousand page loads and over 8,000 visitors to my blog since I opened it a little less than ten weeks ago. Not bad for the new kid on the block.

Before I go: GO ANGELS! AHEM! The LA girl in me comes out. I may live in Arizona now, but I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley area of LA, so I have a special place in my heart for the So Cal teams.

Hope you're all well! Have a great night everyone.