A year gone by

I just noticed on my Blogger dashboard that my last post here was a year ago today. I'm still a stay-at-home geek, although I think that might change sometime soon... unless I decide to go back to school, which is always a possibility.

The problem is, there are too many things I would like to do, and too many skills I would like to bring into whatever I do next. I was a librarian for a while, and I know I enjoy working in a library (I was a library tech while working on my degree, and that's when working in the library was the most fun). I did IT support and web development for a while, and I actually do like helping people troubleshoot their problems. I feel like a complete dolt where design is concerned, but I love building interactive sites that actually DO something. One of my first PHP projects was creating an interactive quiz for pharmacy students that helped lead them to the right answer, instead of just giving them a WRONG or a RIGHT result. That's not to say, however, that I wouldn't enjoy learning about design, because I do understand design principles; I just can't seem to apply them to web sites.

I was a copyeditor for a while, but I kind of hate that. I've also done a lot of writing and desktop publishing and all of that kind of thing. I wouldn't mind doing the desktop publishing thing again, but I've come to realize that I'm really not all that interested in writing.

One of the things that has led me to that realization is that I've been doing some SEO writing for an Evil Content Site (hint: it's not Demand Studios). And... I don't like it. I don't like feeling like a hack. I don't like it when a friend who's a real-life professional journalist chats me up on Facebook in the evening and asks what I'm doing, and I say "watching TV" when I'm really cranking out 400 words on Caring for Your Pet Armadillo while my husband watches TV. Then today I got a note from an editor--not my editor, but my editor's boss--saying that a phrase in one of my articles duplicated a phrase found in another article online, and stressing the need to have absolutely 100% unique content. The thing is, I know I did not plagiarize that phrase. But the thing about this kind of writing is that there is so damn much of it, and it's all over the web, and you see the same phrase over and over again until it sticks in your head, and I think that's a problem that I don't want to be part of.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to make enough to pay for the difference between three-day-a-week preschool and five-day-a-week preschool. I'm just thinking I'll have to do it in a different way.