My side gig might still survive

I just got an e-mail from the middleman of my side-gig saying a client had requested me to be available for their new announcement next week, at the regular rate of $40/page. Since this usually only takes like a half hour or so per page, this is a good hourly wage. I just wish the jobs were a little more frequent than they are, as I seldom get more than one or two of these a month, and sometimes I get none. For the client this is also a bargain, because they don’t have to maintain a jobforce capable of doing this everyday even if they are paying premium rates for each document.

I’m not sure, but I think the people I work for have marketing departments, they’re just not staffed with native speakers of American English, and as I have mentioned the documents I get look to be badly machine translated. So they do the creative part, send it through some algorithm to translate their market-speak to American, and I clean up their poetry to something Americans will understand and if I’m good their customers here will fall for it just like their native customers fall for theirs. I’m not good at advertising copy, but when given something to work from I can do a decent enough job. My NDA prevents me from mentioning even the industries I work for, but I get to cover a bunch of different ones. I’ve never had to do any cosmetics, and now that I wrote that I probably will.

Another thing I’m not sure of is how many other writers are “in the stable” as it were. I mean there are thousands of medium-sized and small companies in that part of the world, but they can’t all be releasing products at the same time so that large numbers of writers like me would be required. But until recently I had a steady stream of projects to do without any big surges that would imply seasonal spikes in product releases or long gaps that would imply quiet phases between seasonal spikes, everything has been sorta steady if sparce, as I wrote earlier they come about once or twice a month. So instead of spending too much time thinking about it I’ll just enjoy the easy work and the small amount of money I get, that basically pays for an occasional fancy takeout or delivery meal. And speaking of which I need to order some fried rice and lo mien this evening from China Harbor so they will still be there when this mess gets back to normal.

Now about what I did yesterday. The local grocery has reserved shopping for us olds and other people who can’t do hand to hand with the Karens over toilet paper and hand sanitizer, so I did another stay up until noon to get Mrs. the Poet things we couldn’t get Saturday, including allergy pills. Well by the time I got done I was exhausted nigh unto collapse. Seriously I was having problems staying on my feet. And while you would think that would result in dropping off quickly into blissful slumber, you would be quite wrong. I was too physically tired to toss and turn, but my mind still wouldn’t shut down and let me sleep so I mentally tossed and turned while my body couldn’t. It. Was. Annoying.

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A Meandering Post

This post has a lot of subjects to cover so it may seem like the literary equivalent of a one-man ping-pong match.

First things first, I had some kind of gunk in my eyebrows when I took my shower this morning. I don’t know what it was, but it was itchy and took several tries to get it out of the eyebrows. I’m blaming allergies because pollen was deadly high this morning and it wasn’t there when I washed my face before bed this morning. And that’s not a typo, I usually hit the hay between 0300 and 0500.

Sprint-T: The pullrod suspension will lower the C of G very slightly while it also improves shock cooling. It lowers the C of G by letting me lie the shocks down at the bottom of the car instead of standing them up on top of the axle, and it improves shock cooling by collecting a larger mass of air and forcing it around the shocks than they would get just up in the airstream. It seems paradoxical, but you can actually get more cooling by putting something inside a duct than by leaving it in free air. And I was looking at the available springs, I do believe there will be a problem in getting a soft enough spring if I let the motion ratio for the rocker get too large.

My employment situation has gotten worse again. The company I have been getting gigs through has been having problems getting customers to pay for completed projects after delivery, and the standard agreement with us working drones has been payment on delivery to the customer. This has left the company covering for the customers between delivery and payment, but the customers had been paying on time so everybody was good. But lately us drones have delivered on time while customers have been paying late or not at all. Because we drones are technically contractors, or even guns for hire for some of us, we don’t have much recourse when the customer doesn’t pay except to sue the company in the middle that also did not get paid. We can’t sue the customer directly, and the guy we can sue doesn’t have much money to sue for. How this directly affects me is I ordered an expensive comic book (a $20 trade edition) that I was expecting to pay for with my share of a completed project that as of the first of the month hasn’t been paid for, and had to ask Mrs. the Poet for the money so I could keep my account at the comic book store current so I could keep getting my pulls. I only get one pull but there are one-shots and trades I want to get and I have to keep my account out of the red to order them. And yes I do like this particular comic Unbeatable Squirrel Girl enough to actually buy it every month. But with income getting dicey again I’m going to have to change my pre-order to pre-pay when ordering to ensure I get my books.

And I need to pu this to bed and take care of e-mails.