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Careers

Learn a Skill—ONLINE—and Build a New Income Stream

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This fall I’m teaching a fully online college course that will improve your skills as a blog writer and show you how to write winning articles for magazines and newspapers. Many people use professional-level writing skills to generate the sidestream income that we’ve seen is so important to paying off debt and building savings. And some have parlayed freelance writing experience into full-time jobs as magazine or newspaper editors.

In just eight weeks—October 18 through December 10—the course will explain how to structure, write, and market salable copy for commercial venues.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Types of feature articles
• How to structure an effective article
• Generating story ideas
• Finding markets that will buy from you
• Selling to magazines and newspapers
• Finding sources
• How to interview
• Checking facts
• The language and style of popular media
• How to edit your own writing
• Working with editors
• Legal and business aspects of writing for pay

When you write a blog post, you’re often writing one of the several types of the feature article. This is why some of the most engaging bloggers around are former or continuing magazine or newspaper writers and editors, such as this one and this one. If content is king, writing skill is the prime minister.

The course is offered for three credits through Paradise Valley Community College, in Phoenix, Arizona. PVCC is a fully accredited campus of the Maricopa County Community College District, and the course, which comes out of the English department, should transfer to many university English, creative writing, and journalism programs.

So, I invite you to join me in this little adventure. It should be a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to learn more about the craft of writing. If your blog is monetized or you use writing in other aspects of employment, the cost should be deductible.

The easiest way to sign up is over the telephone. Dial 602-787-7000 and register for English 235, Magazine Article Writing, Section 58235. The class runs from October 18 through December 10, 2010.

Because of state and county budget cutbacks, the Registrar’s office is open during the summer from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. PDT, Monday through Thursday; it’s closed on Fridays. Sometimes there’s a wait to get through to a registration worker, but eventually you will reach a human being.

Tuition: A reader asks how much the course costs. According to the registrar’s office, for nonresidents it’s $147/credit hour; for those living in Arizona except for Apache, Santa Cruz, and Greenlee counties, it’s $71/credit hour; for those in Apache, Santa Cruz, and Greenlee counties, it’s $96/credit hour. The cost of tuition and materials may be tax deductible: Check this discussion and this site.

The course materials specify that you must have a computer and high-speed Internet connection, and so these costs may also be to some extent deductible; check with your tax advisor about that.

Images: Vogue Magazine, February 15, 1917. Public Domain. Sunset Magazine, February 1911. Public Domain.

Why Being Passionate about Your Career Can Drive You Nuts

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A guest post by Simple Life in France

People often rail against giving up their dreams, working a 9-to-5  job they hate and having the life sucked out of them.  But what if you work atypical hours doing something you’re passionate about with an outlet for your creativity?  Are you safe from job-induced insanity?

Hardly.

I’m always amused when people solve the problem of work-induced stress by saying, “Just do what you love,” often followed by, “and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  Not so, I say—and here are just a few reasons:

• Often work you love is precarious. Want to be an art teacher, college professor, journalist . . ?  The scarcity of stable, full time employment in these fields can leave you scrambling from one temporary gig to another with spotty health care and benefits.

• The politics that arise in environments with low job security can be reminiscent of a snake-pit. I once had a long conversation with a friend who felt he’d sold out by becoming an attorney in some ways, but who enjoyed the cooperation between opposing attorneys during their cases.  I had to admit to this friend that the teachers in the school where I worked refused to share teaching ideas or collaborate because they were in direct competition with each other for their jobs.  Not quite what I’d envisioned when I took up my passion.

• When you believe in what you do, you tend to take it home with you—literally and figuratively. Journalists, writers, teachers, musicians, artists (etc.) tend to mull over projects constantly, not simply while they are at work.  You may find yourself putting in extra (unpaid) hours because you enjoy what you do and want to do your best.

• Your passion can become corrupted by the employer-employee relationship. When you believe in what you do, you’re likely to have strong opinions about how it should be done. You may have an idea about how you want a specific graphic design project to turn out, but your employer doesn’t agree. You may have a strong opinion on student/teacher ratio that doesn’t jibe with the state budget.  Your editor may request changes in your writing in the name of marketability.

When someone else pays you to do something you’re passionate about, you often find yourself trying to decide whether to compromise, to subvert or to leave.

Passionate about your career? Should you abandon all hope?

That sounds like a personal question to me.  I must admit that for all the drawbacks I found in working in a field I love, I’ve never quite been able to imagine myself doing something else.  Although on occasion, I gaze wistfully at friends who are bored with their work but can come home, put up their feet, drink a beer and forget all about it.

What do you think?  Where do you find the balance between work and passion?

Enjoy these other posts at Simple in France:

The Slippery Smell of Clean and its Costs
Nearing Nine Months in France
Village Idiots at our Table, Pallets Under our Bed

Entrepreneurs: Adirondack Chimney Sweep

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A chimney sweep in one of America’s warmest cities: Mark C. Keever is the second in Funny’s series of stories about entrepreneurs who find creative and unusual ways to jump off the treadmill.

I came across Mark and his business, Adirondack Chimney Sweep, in Angie’s List, where a long line of customers had left ecstatic reviews about his work. Not knowing whether the chimney in my 1971 house had ever been cleaned, about the beginning of December I gave him a call, hoping to have the job done before the big Christmas party.

Mais non! The man was booked into the beginning of January! A chimney sweep with personality, it develops, has more work than he can handle. When Mark dropped in the other day to apply his skills to my old fireplace, complete with his broom and old black stovepipe hat, I asked him a few questions.

FaM: Mark, how on earth did you get into the chimney-sweep business?

Keever: Well, I grew up in Queensbury, New York, a small town between Glens Falls and Lake George. Most people didn’t have much, and when you graduated from high school, your career choice was going to work in the paper mills or going to work in the local prison. Because people had to do for themselves, one of the things we learned in our shop class was how to clean potbellied stoves and chimneys.

In my senior year, I got in a motorcycle accident and was seriously hurt: broke my left foot in twelve places, broke my left leg, messed up my knees and elbows. That was the end of my future in the paper mill.

FaM: It must have kept you out of Vietnam, too.

Keever: That’s right. Couldn’t get into the military, either, because the damage to my foot made me unfit for combat.

FaM: So what did you do?

Keever: I came out to Arizona to recuperate and ended up going to work for the Greyhound Corporation. I worked for seven years, and then I went with the Southern Pacific Railroad. That was a good job, but after four years I was laid off—along with about 9,000 other people.

Not knowing what to do next, I looked around and found out that one in four houses in the Phoenix area has a fireplace. Well, that was a natural: I already knew how to sweep chimneys.

I started a business, but by the time we were up and running, it was out of season. Nobody thinks about their fireplaces on a 110-degree summer day. So I was really struggling.

To make ends meet, I decided I’d better take a full-time job with the City of Glendale. I was happy to get the job, but I kept the chimney-sweep business as a sideline.

And I also thought I’d better go to college to learn how to run a business, so I enrolled in a business course at Phoenix College. It only took me 25 years to finish my associate’s degree!

Meanwhile, I kept on working at the city and also kept sweeping chimneys as a side job.

FaM: It’s always a good idea to have a second income stream, isn’t it?

Keever: Yes. I was glad I had it, because last spring the city offered its employees a buy-out deal. I had only just earned the 80 “points” city and state workers need to retire, but there they were: I actually was in a position to retire. I thought it over for a while, and then finally I decided to take it.

So I got a good severance package and plenty of time to make a go of Adirondack.

FaM: That must have been a breathtaking moment!

Keever: I’ve never been happier! No more stress of a day job and a commute, no more working for a big bureaucracy. I’ve got all the work I can do, most of it in the wintertime while the weather’s nice, and the business has really taken off. All told, Adirondack Chimney Sweep  has had 2,187 customers.

* * *

Cleaning the fireplace, a two-and-a-half-hour project, entailed climbing on the roof to brush out the chimney and then engaging in some lengthy and vigorous cleanup with a large shop vac. By the time Mark finished, the firebox and the family room were spotless.

He sprinkled a handful of salt at the back of the firebox. “This brings good luck,” he said. Then he set a shiny copper penny in the front right corner of the fireplace. “A penny in the fireplace not only brings more good luck,” he continued, “but because it’s this year’s date, all you  have to do is look at it to remember what year you last had the chimney cleaned. This one should be cleaned about once every four or five years.”

After a short demonstration of how to lay a fire and how to use a newspaper torch to warm the cold air seeping down a chimney to make the flue draw better, he was off.

And the next time that thing needs to be cleaned, I know who I’m gonna call!

Freedom’s just another word…

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In the “just another word for nothin’ left to lose” department, take a look at this excellent post by Curmudgeon at BripBlap. Aside from having delivered an awesome piece of writing here, Curmudgeon is dead center on target. You don’t want to lose what matters in the pursuit of money or career.

Some years ago I connected with an old acquaintance. She was an associate professor in the Speech Department when I was in graduate school. Shortly after I finished the degree, she disappeared from the scene. She started a business of her own, catering to large corporations: basically what she did was hire out to teach the subject matter she’d taught in the classroom, only tailored to employee development. Before long she expanded the business to D.C. By the time we touched base again, she had farmed out the Washington office to a partner and moved back to the desert, where she continued to direct the operation. When we met for lunch, she was wearing more on her back than my entire net worth.

Like Curmudgeon, she had undergone a life-threatening medical experience while she was hitting her stride as a young professor, one that forced her to think about whether she really wanted to keep on with her job. When this happened to her, she was tenured and set for a perfectly fine academic career at a time when academic jobs were hard to come by. Her decision? She thought not.

The insight she gained from a dangerous health crisis was much the same as Curmudgeon’s: trading off your health for money—or for a job that makes you unhappy, for whatever reason—isn’t worth it.

Interestingly, after my friend started doing what she wanted to do with her life, she started to mint money. She loved what she was doing, and people paid her well for it.

The money will take care of itself. You have to take care of yourself.

Revanche on the secret joy of unemployment

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Today we have a guest post by Revanche, proprietor of one of my favorite PF blogs, A Gai Shan Life. Enjoy!

VH asked me how I’m dealing with unemployment now that I’m well in, and I had to think about it.

Most notably, believe it or not, is the fact that I was laid off almost six months ago and my head has not yet exploded.

It should have, considering the degree to which I obsessed over every possible detail of pending unemployment in the months prior to L-day (all the gory details of which you can find blogged between the dates of July 2008 and June 2009). But it didn’t.

In all my planning and calculating, plotting and planning, résumé-building and interview scheduling, I utterly underestimated the sheer freedom that comes with unemployment.

Not the freedom of just staying at home all day in my pajamas, if I please. [Don’t ask me if that’s ever happened, please. Let me have some dignity.] The kind of nearly spiritual freedom, relief really, that comes of knowing that my time shackled to that job out of a sense of responsibility to provide for my family, to do the right thing, to be grateful for the job I had in this economy, was over. Out of a job though I am, I’m also free of the company and of the kind of people who believed in lying, cheating and scamming. Not my kind of folk.

Flying utterly in the face of my workaholic tendencies, I’ve discovered an odd and unnatural secret of unemployment: if you have some financial security, it can actually be refreshing. Who knew?

Whether or not you know me, that sounds like crazy talk.

I assure you, I haven’t lost my mind. I hate not having a steady, full-fledged income, I hate not contributing to my retirement accounts, I hate that I haven’t deposited money into my savings accounts in massive chunks in oh-so-long. And this time has been filled with working on projects, seeking out challenging employment opportunities and interviewing.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t admit that I’ve also discovered the wonders of having the time to travel (New York, San Francisco, San Diego), travel (New York), and travel (Hawaii). I haven’t ever had this kind of freedom to hit the road, I could not have jumped in the car and gone to a friend in need while fully employed, and I haven’t ever been able to take classes without wedging it into 12-hour workdays (before, during or after college). These things are important to me, and without this breather, I doubt that my life plan would ever have allowed for discovering new cities, or the commitment to taking care of ill or grieving friends. And with certain health issues, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve realized I’m allowed to rest instead of forcing myself to face another 18-hour-day despite my body’s pleas for surcease.

The cost of this freedom, all the deprivations of earlier years, was completely worth it. That’s easy to say now because 1) I don’t feel them anymore, and 2) I’m practically living in the lap of luxury now thanks to how I lived before. What’s that saying, “Live like no one else will, so you can live like no one else can”? That little truism is absolutely true. It wasn’t easy being sensible about every penny I spent, and I can’t discount the unemployment income and subsidized COBRA, which have both gone a long way in stretching out my savings as well. But I’m able to look for the next best career step, pay my bills, stay out of debt, and still do good things. That is well worth the extra six to twelve months spent in the next best thing to Dante’s Inferno.

So how am I doing? Right now, though VH occasionally twits me 😉 about stacking up enough cash to be the envy of fellow unemployeds, I’m nervous about the future. I’d be a fool not to be—in this economy? With these pseudo-if-not-real hiring freezes? Since last week, I’ve seen three more friends lose their jobs and another floundering to keep his business open. Times remain very tough, economic indicators notwithstanding.

Still, I’m not allowing fear to paralyze me. I’m working hard to find my next new path and get well, and I’m also trying to stay in the moment and enjoy a little of what I’ve earned. We’ll see how I fare in the next six months as benefits start to run out. I certainly hope to have landed a job by that time.

Die cast…

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The interview at Glendale Community College went well. I think. But then…what do I know?

Their strategy is to hand you a C-level student paper and ask you to grade it in 15 minutes. Then they take a half hour during which you are to respond to six questions. So it’s a whirlwind trip that can’t possibly reveal very much about any one candidate other than how he combs his hair or whether she brushes her teeth.

A friend had clued me that Glendale prides itself on its high-tech pedagogy and that its leadership is committed to the Student Success Initiative, and so I had several related buzzwords on my tongue. Probably if I was weak on anything it was on pedagogical theory. I don’t do theory well. I teach by the seat of my pants. Generally I come out about where the theorists would like, but I don’t get there the same way.

So, we shall see.

We may see fairly soon: they’re hiring for January! We’re already a third of the way through November. They’ll have to select a hire soon, in order to get the person on the payroll by the time spring classes begin. Surely they’ll make a decision by the middle of December.