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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Job madness continues…

It’s been a few days since I updated you and while nothing has really coalesced, there have been a couple of nibbles. In fact, I’m waiting to hear back today about a very small gig (less than a week) editing a doc for a school district, and then I just got an e-mail about a job for a client I worked with twice in the past on Web copy. That’s approximately a 1-month gig in August. Both should be interesting work, both off-site, and both should allow me the flexibility to keep looking for the next one.

I’m probably going to begin cold-calling, to see if I can’t ferret out a few opportunities, but really, times like this, I need to think about leaning on the network…it’s just that iffy.

On the career development/advancement/what-do-I-wanna-do-when-I-grow-up side, I’ve “hired” a personal tutor to help me learn to program. He’s eager to get started, and so am I. Saturday is my first lesson! I’ve been teaching myself to program, with my end-game goal a couple of programs I’ve written myself. The self-teaching is going well, but slowly. In order to expedite the process, I’m going the tutor route. He’ll teach me the stuff that developers need to know so that I can write for a developer audience (even during hard times, there seems to be a need for writers who can do this) and he’ll assist me in writing my own programs, which will serve as my calling card to prospective clients. Though, one of the programs I want to create is a Word plug-in that will let me change the tense of my story with a click (or step through it, like a spell checker), saving oodles and oodles of time! If I can make that work, a “person” switching program would even be cooler!

Okay, there’s another dream, laid out before you. Sometimes it seems writing it down makes it more real.

2 comments:

RK Sterling said...

Good luck with the job and the learnin'.

Clifford said...

Thanks, Kate!

About Me

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This is me and one of my two cats. His name is Cougar, and he’s an F1 Chausie. A chausie is a new breed of cat under development. Chausies are the result of a cross between a domestic cat (in Cougar’s case, a Bengal) and a jungle cat (Felis Chaus). Cougar’s mom is 8 pounds and his father is a 30-pound jungle cat. He’s about 16 pounds, super intelligent, spirited, and toilet trained. A writer without a cat (or two) is not to be trusted.