My Career!

Writing! Though writing is not how I make my living (yet?), I am a professional at it. I've had several nonfiction pieces published--articles on asexuality--and my book on the topic sold to Skyhorse Publishing (Carrel Books) and was published September 2, 2014. I hope to become a professional in the fiction market too, but so far my books have not sold. I have a literary agent for nonfiction and a literary agent for fiction, and hopefully soon my fiction agent will sell my fantasy series! In the meantime, it remains on submission.

Administrative Assisting! My main day job is working as an administrative assistant for a transportation engineering consulting firm. The company is based in California, but I work at the Tampa office, and I'm basically a secretary for everybody there, doing their little projects and whatnot. Mainly I occupy the admin desk; get and route mail, e-mail, faxes, and voice messages; answer the phone; make copies; order supplies; send e-mails, faxes, and letters; and stamp things with a variety of lovely rubber stamps. Heh. I'm also pretty heavily involved in the business development side of things, editing and laying out proposals for when we respond to ads trying to get work for our company. Actually my job is sometimes a bit difficult because I have to keep straight all these tiny things like invoices and paychecks and who's working on what, but mostly my function is to keep the administrative tasks off the hands of the engineers so that they can work. I'm frequently useful in helping some of the engineers with their computers, and there are times I have to make collection calls or make sure our firm is registered as being qualified for the work we perform. It's a lot to keep up with. I do a lot of repetitive work, filing, printing things out, word processing, taking messages, organizing, and, well, coffee-making, but I have to say it is a GREAT job. I love having 'Net access at work for any research I need to do, having my own desk and a cute little kitchen, and being trusted by my employers to do my job on my own. The office is a very small and close-knit office, and there are only a few people working in the building at a time unless we have clients in or some field people are visiting. They treat me well and the pay is great and the benefits are awesome, and we even have casual Fridays, which is fun. My boss is the best boss I've ever had (and you can tell I'm not just saying that to be nice, since I whined about management all the time at my last job). I'm very happy to say that the job is considered part-time, so it leaves me a lot of time and mental freedom to work on my writing at home. It's definitely a job where I generally get to leave work at work, which is exactly what I was hoping for failing getting a job as a bestselling author and all. Hehehe. I started this job in July 2006 and have been happy there ever since. I know I am well suited for the work and I hope I'm there a long time. If you want to see some pictures of my work environment, you can go here!

Editing! I love to edit. I always did it for my own books and for others' books for free before, but now I make money doing it. I am a freelance editor. I have a contract with a writer who has done everything from books to blogs, and I edit his online magazine where he does war journalism. I've edited a bunch of his other publications as well. In association with one of his books, I've also worked with a nonprofit group in Massachusetts, editing their various communications from media alerts to year-end reports. I once passed a test and got a contract with Health Communications, Inc. (HCI), the publishers of Chicken Soup for the Soul, for freelance editing, but they never send me anything. My job is basically to do either proofreading or copyediting. Copyediting pays better but is more difficult; it actually involves reading an earlier edit of a book, and pointing out things like continuity problems, sentence structure issues, and factual errors, as well as finding typos and editing glitches. Proofreading just involves finding the last little bits. I edit for local writers and friends when they ask me; sometimes I get paid and sometimes I don't. I have been acknowledged in the credits of published work before for my editing, and I would enjoy doing it full time if I didn't love my current job as much as I do.

Writing! I have a compensated position writing short articles about asexuality for Good Vibrations Magazine online. I was recommended for the position by someone who knew my work in activism online and accepted by the editor after he read a writing sample. They were looking for someone who could speak from experience about various issues of concern to the asexual community and bringing the sex-positive community into the circle to act as allies for each other. My author profile and list of articles is available on their site.

Past Jobs Before my current job, I spent six years working at a chain bookstore, Books-A-Million. My title was "Kids' Department Head," and that basically means I had to clean up the kids' section all the time and put away the children's books. It was actually a lot more fun than it sounds, and more fun than I expected when I got the position. I often had to work at the register ringing up customers, though, or at the customer service counter, which involved basically fielding customer questions about where to find books on the shelf and ordering them if we didn't have them, and actually placing those orders and calling the customers when their books came in. I liked working in a bookstore because I got to be in contact with people who actually read, and also to be around books myself so I could decide what I wanted to read. Not to mention that believe it or not I actually liked helping most customers. I kept a log of the strange and funny experiences I had while working there; go see it if you'd like to. Also, I have a rant about working in retail which is quite funny. And if you'd like to see some rather fun pictures of my old work environment, go here! Web pages: You can tell I love making Web pages, but did you know I've done it professionally? I have had two jobs doing Web work. One was for a local writer who paid me to update and revamp his site. My other Web job was with the University of Florida's Special Education department. I maintained the Conflict Resolution and Peer Mediation Web Site, which was not created by me but was tweaked and revamped and added to numerous times; I also created from scratch a "Cognitive-Behavioral Prevention of Aggression Web Site," which included imagemap technology and other wonderful things. Since I graduated they found a new Webmaster for the sites and they are both entirely changed from what I did, but I did work on them for a time. Once upon a time, I was an AOL Chat Host. I was hired at the Classified SpeakEasy site as a Scorekeeper, and I went through all the training, but for some reason they never made the requested updates to my account that would have made me an official host, and even though I asked repeatedly about what to do to take further training and to have my account converted to non-paying status, no one seemed to want to take care of the problem, so I stopped pursuing it. I knew a lot about hosting because I had two previous positions. I was an AOL host at Hecklers Online, which involved mostly harassing the members and putting the occasional smackdown on a TOS violator, and before that I was a chat room host at Kids' WB! It was a children's chat and I was very good at it and very involved in the chat room. You can read more about why I had to leave that job here if you like. All in all, I was a chat host for about five years, starting back in 1997. I had some sort of secretarial work in winter of 2001, with a cowboy named Woody who wanted me to help put together his directory of horse farms. It was a short-lived job where I plugged addresses into a special program on his computer, and though he talked about paying me to make him a Web page, he mostly just talked about it and never asked me to do it. The job ended when he had to put the project on hold for some reason and that's really the last I heard from him. I once worked at Baskin-Robbins. I was only there a month before I was fired by the manager for sleeping an hour and a half into my shift. My theory is that she fired me because she overhired and just wanted to get rid of one person, seeing as how other people with seniority had committed larger sins and not been fired. (For instance, one boy was an hour late *opening* the store because he had a *hangover*; I wasn't even responsible for opening the store, and my co-workers said that they were both sitting around doing nothing anyway. . . .) Everyone was complaining about not getting enough hours around the time I was fired, so it seemed like they needed to get rid of someone and I was just the first to screw up. I've worked as an office assistant for Dr. Stephen Smith at my college, which was the way I got the Web job for the education sites. It was good preparation for my current administrative assisting duties, as he often asked me to organize documents and sometimes even grade papers. I was a temp for his usual secretary when she didn't have classes in the summer. When I was in high school I worked at Sweet Tomatoes Restaurant as a pasta chef, a greeter, and a salad chef (every once in a while I'd do Dining Room Assistant--DRA--kinda like waitressing but not quite). It was one of the best jobs I ever had and the only reason I left was that I had to go to college.

THE OTHER PAGES FROM THE "LIFE" SECTION:

CREDITS: The Background Boutique: This page's background.