Tag: reporting (Page 8 of 8)

Quiet here on the blog and elsewhere. It’s been kind of a strange week. I’ve been doing some data migration (that’s fancy talk) which has disrupted some of my normal routines. C. is being a royal pain at night, which makes mornings tough. I’ve got thoughts, just not always the motivation to post them for you.

Several folks have asked about what the job prospects are looking like. To be honest, there’s not much going on right now. A friend had connected me with a company she did some writing for, and they seemed interested before Memorial Day, but I haven’t heard back from my contact in weeks. It would have been nice to do some work right away.

Oddly enough, now that I’m out of school and have lots of time to come up with ideas for articles to pitch, I honestly can’t come up with a thing. I sit around occasionally and try to brainstorm, and either get a few half-assed ideas or none at all. I’ve posted a resume onto Monster, but the only hit I got was clearly a generic request for anyone to interview for some kind of sales job. I signed up on a site called guru.com, which connects free-lancers in all fields with people who need their skills. I haven’t found anything great there yet, but may start bidding on a few jobs just to get my feedback score up (It’s kind of like eBay – you bid on a job, and if you get it, your employer is expected to give public feedback when the job is completed to help other potential employers). I’m in the process of putting together high-quality copies of my best campus paper articles and sending them to all the community papers in the area, to see if they have any use for free lancers. However, the big media companies have been buying all of them up in recent years, so most are owned by Gannett and affiliated with the Indy Star, and thus have cut back on their use of free lancers.

What I really need to do is block off time every day to scour the various sites set up for free lancers rather than hitting them haphazardly. My goal is still to work on a free lance basis for the time being. S.’s job has gotten more involved in recent months – she’s helping to start the hospital’s peds residency program – and she’s spending a little more time in meetings, so I’m needed around the house more than I used to be. I’m enjoying the stay-at-home dad thing, now that that’s what I really am and not part of what I’m doing in balance with school. But, I really like to spend money, and I need something more than my little editing job to justify potential expenditures! Plus, M. starts preschool in the fall, and we’ve got tuition due.

I guess I hoped something would fall in my lap right at the beginning, like the one contact I had last month, and figured everthing would flow from there. I’m a little frustrated that I can’t get my brain on track to at least send some ideas out to magazines and newspapers to see if anyone bites. It’ll happen, I’m sure, but I’d rather it came sooner rather than later.

I am now in possession of business cards that identify me as a writer and editor. Yikes, that sounds a little strange. More about the process of actually getting the cards in a second. I realized when they were delivered Sunday (Sunday delivery, very nice!) that this was kind of a big deal. I had business cards back when I worked the The Big C Corp. However, those were a bit of a let down. When I first started there, our department did not have an admin, so it was like six months before I realized I was supposed to get them automatically. When I received them it wasn’t that big of a deal because I was no longer a fresh-faced, new-hire. Just to spite the company, I ordered a new box every year even though I did nothing with them. Tree killer! When I switched jobs into a client-facing role, I got some of the super-sexy cards the company was throwing around at the time. I always felt a little embarrassed handing them out, as I thought they were a bit busy, but they fit the image of the company: flashy, cutting-edge, and over-priced. But these new cards, they’re all mine, and rather than just being a traditional item to hand to a client these are going to be tools to help me generate work. In theory.

As for the process, it was interesting. I’d been looking at some on-line sites for several weeks. There is a company called Vista Print that has all kinds of crazy deals for either free or cheap cards. I spent hours looking through it and other similar sites, but everything seemed too generic or cheap. Finally, I randomly found a very sweet site with all kinds of amazing cards. We probably spent two hours on this site on night last week. I picked out a couple I liked, saved them, and then tried to figure out how to contact these people. There is no phone number or address listed on the site. An e-mail I fired off for info wasn’t answered for 48 hours. That seemed a little sketchy, and I grew reluctant to send them my credit card info. Oh, and they were pricey as hell, too, unless you bought insane quantities like 1000. So, with some help from a friend (who is free to identify herself), I got connected with a friend of hers who does printing out of her home. We worked on about eight designs until we got one I liked. I ordered them Friday, she printed them right away, and dropped them off at the house Sunday morning while she was running errands. Pretty cool.

So, other than just a long-winded explanation of how I now have business cards, this is also a friendly reminder to all of you that I’m now in business. If you know people who need stuff written for their businesses, I could be their guy. Or people with websites who need content. Or any other writing/editing gigs out there, don’t be afraid to let me know about them. I haven’t got the whole rate thing figured out yet, so I’ll use the standard disclaimer that my prices are “competitive.”