Sometime around November of last fall I began spending time during official work hours not doing official work. I should rephrase that to make it less incriminating. There was often no work for me to do at my official place of work, so I started doing what everyone does in that exact situation. Due to the creation of this blog, I had begun to realize that a lot of people were getting paid to write stuff online. It was usually a very small amount of money (even though the spam would have you believe they're making millions and millions), but it was still money.

I found this terribly efficient site related to Amazon that was called mTurk. Turking (and you know I love it when a word gets verbed) is creating small, sometimes poorly written, pieces of ad copy for people all over the world. Often, people that turk are from countries where a piece of bread feeds a family of five. For two weeks. This means that website owners can put up pieces written in broken English on their sites for a very small price, and everyone seems to walk away happy.

Enter, me. And while it would be nice to think that I revolutionized the online writing industry and demanded a lot of money for my somewhat less broken English, that was not the case. Like most of what has happened over the last nine months of my life, I approached it with a fresh, green naiveté that I, frankly, haven't felt since I was about sixteen. The first two jobs I happened to see posted on mTurk were for $35 and $50. They required that I write 500 words, no research needed. It took about a month, but both turk listers paid. I was now living in a world where people were paying me an average of $85 dollars per hour for my efforts.

Months passed. There was a pleasant holiday season, a culinarily delightful trip to Las Vegas, and hours upon hours of misery getting up every day and trudging off to a place that I despised and that charged me $6 per day to escape. I continued to write, and I slowly learned that being paid in third world currency was not an option for a professional writer. Occasions kept arising in which people asked me to write things for them, not horribly complicated things or extremely creative things, and they would deposit dollar upon dollar into my Paypal account. All of this was because I was writing for them. A business plan was created. A website was built. This website was neglected because of all of those occurrences. Throughout spring (which I'm convinced still hasn't really occurred, since it's nearly mid-June and it's IN THE 50's), things converged and an idea that had been in the making since I was in second grade sort of suddenly came together.

I realize that things that take 26 years typically aren't considered sudden, but it felt sudden. One minute the main reason I got out of bed in the morning was coffee, which I was consuming WAY too much of, and the next minute, I'd decorated an office with cute things from Ikea. And best of all? People are still paying me to write for them. Seriously. I'm still in awe of it myself. I get paid to do something I enjoy doing. This past Saturday I attended a workshop for writers, and in several of the classes, the facilitator deferred to me and used the phrase "since you're working in the field." I'm sorry to say that I spent over a year and a half at my previous job, and to be honest, I'm still not entirely sure what that field was.

So. The good news? Besides the fact that I get to visit the farmer's market mid-day on Thursdays, and munch my oatmeal while perusing Craiglist in my office that no one decorates but me, all while my cats look on deeply in love with this new arrangement? The good news is I am doing what I love. Among the other projects that are bouncing around in my skull right now is updating this site. There's a Mac in the house and I intends to use it. There's a good chance there will be some other more specialized sites as well. I will (hopefully) finally complete my anniversary opus and feel a little less guilty about putting it off. And I'll be writing day in and day out, vowing to avoid the coffee that will never go truly un-avoided.

This thing we got here? Everyone wins. See how happy it makes us?

                                         
                                                     Maybe you can't tell, but this is how they look when they are blinded by joy.