My name is Aileen Journey and I’m in my early 40s. I don’t fit much of the profile of the more typical blogger of younger and male, but I’m very much a computer geek. My father worked in the computer field from when I was young. As a child, when I visited my father at work he’d pick me up and sit me on the card reader computers. I started programming Basic on massive, shaking metal teletype computers when I was eleven. That was all there was to do with computers. It was even before space invaders, which came out when I was in junior high school. I remember all the boys sitting on the two Commodore 64s in the music room playing space invaders for hours. It seemed more boring to me than actually programming the computer.
I didn’t end up going into the computer field as a career. I started in Sign Language interpreting, working also in group homes for adults with mental illness, and adults with mental retardation. Later I got my Master’s degree and started a retail store and an online store. I sold the brick and mortar store to an awful partner who drove it into the ground and kept the online store. She also left me in more than $60,000 worth of debt. At the same time, the Internet bubble burst and I found myself single and unemployed with a number of foster children. I started a Ph.D. in Psychology and looked for a job. I couldn’t seem to get hired. Finally, my mother suggested that I try substitute teaching. I thought you needed a degree in education for that, but it turns out in my state you just need a Bachelor’s degree and a TB test. After getting the TB test, I signed up at two local schools and the closest school for the Deaf. I subbed at the school for the Deaf most and soon they hired me full time.
I worked there as a High School teacher with Deaf and Hard of Hearing students for six years. In addition, I started teaching college online as I was still single and wanted to earn a little extra money without leaving the two children who I adopted from foster care. So, in 2005 I had a full-time teaching job, a part-time online teaching job and was a single parent of a just adopted three year old and four a year old.
I had started the Ph.D. because I kept thinking that I wanted to write about how people take care of and deal with children and people with mental retardation and mental illness. I felt that the methods in use while I was working with the populations were disrespectful and, worse, ineffective. I had to quit the Ph.D. program because of the full-time job, but I continued wanting to write. I considered that perhaps I could write without the Ph.D.
I started writing articles in my few spare moments and got some of them published in local newspapers. Then I decided to write a book proposal. I got myself some books on the subject and started writing one section at a time. I remember coming home after work and sitting in the front yard to watch my two boys, who were just learning how to ride their bicycles, bike around in the street in front of our house. I would sit and read the books and take notes and write bits of each section whenever I could. After a year or so I had completed a rough draft of a book proposal. I then hired a book proposal coach, Lori Lisi, who helped me polish it up.
Then in the beginning of the year of 2007 I was finally out of debt, I was making enough money to put a bunch away for retirement and buy extra things. I had a book proposal close to ready to be sent to agents, and I had published a few articles here and there. I started to work on my budget to see if I could earn enough money teaching online to make ends meet long enough to try to get a writing career off the ground. I did the budget repeatedly and if I paid careful attention to where I was spending my money, it looked very doable.
I gave my notice in March and finished out the school year. I doubled my online teaching work and started reading everything about blogs and earning money from them. I feel confident since I don’t need much money from my writing at the moment that I can survive on the online teaching while I learn. I had planned on finishing my book proposal and sending it out to agents while publishing articles in magazines. After getting involved in the blog world, though, I’m changing my goals. I plan to start a couple of blogs and see if I can get an audience for them then attempt to approach agents after that. The feedback that I could get from the blogs could make the books far more useful in addition to making sure people are interested in the subjects first.
