O.K., so this blog has never really "happened", obviously, given that my last post was a year ago. However, our laptop died completely before we moved to Georgia and now our six or seven year old PC is gasping its dying breath, so Lee found a great online deal for a new laptop that is on the cheap end of the spectrum, but still gets good reviews. I think I should be able to make it pay for itself if I apply myself to the endeavor.
I thought about going on to law school. I even blew two hundred bucks on signing up at the last possible hour to sit for the LSAT entrance exam, thumbed through a few prep books and tried in vain to answer some practice test questions, only to come to the demoralizing conclusion that logical thought processes do not come naturally to me. I'm not an idiot, I could do it if I tried. If I went through the practice tests and studied the books on "logic games" theory, I am confident that I could figure it out. But do I really want to do so? I mean, first of all, it seems ridiculous that in order to enter a profession wherein I already do most of the day to day work involved, I just don't get paid for it, I have to study how to play games and beat a test that has nothing to do with anything except knowing how to play a game. Seriously? You have to be able to play a game quickly and that's what determines whether or not you will be allowed to spend thirty grand, A YEAR, learning how to look up a bunch of information you may or may not need to be able to find in order to write a brief sometime in the future? I am not worried about being able to handle the actual job of an attorney. I already do everything an attorney does except argue in an actual courtroom and get paid actual money. Is more money and being able to write the word "Esquire" after my name really worth five years of never seeing my husband during the week as I go to my real job all day, then dash to the train station, ride to scary downtown Atlanta in the dark, sit in class for four hours trying to keep my eyes open, then freak about being mugged at any moment as I attempt to travel through a dangerous city at night, get on a spooky train, return to my car and drive home, not getting to bed until nearly midnight, and spending the weekends studying rather than hanging out with family and friends? Five years seems like a long time to be miserable and stressed out, accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that cannot be discharged, for something I don't really feel that passionate about in the first place.
Anyway, all of that to say that maybe I need to spend my evenings at home, doing something I like to do to make a little extra money. Blogging, it seems, is the way to go. There are tons of places on the internet where you can get paid a little here and a little there to right articles and book reviews, but they are all paying you for marketing exposure. You have to have your own place for the articles to be seen, to reach people they can't or don't want to put forth the effort to reach. You have to have a blog. A blog that is followed by, at the very least, all of your friends and family so all those people paying you to write get their money back via advertising their wares in your articles or with your articles, or you directing your loved ones, who may be the only people interested or pretending to be interested in your articles, to their websites displaying their wares. It is capitalist commercialism at its height, but if you can't beat 'em, I guess you have to join 'em. I won't make near as much money as I would as an attorney, but I also won't have to be tortured for five years before I can start doing it.
So as soon as our new computer gets here, I'll get cracking and start churning out something. I'm not sure what, but something. Right now only desperate companies or those looking for any little bit of exposure will let me work for them, like Christian romance book publishers and Bounty papertowels, so I have no idea what this blog will be about, but we'll see what happens. Stay tuned....
