Sherri Cornelius

I often post about my half-hearted job search—like how I need money, or how hard it is to find a job after being a stay-at-home mom for eight years, or how I don’t know if I can work in a public place with all the smells, or not knowing what field to go into with my non-specific set of skills. I’ve known I needed to get a job for money, yes, but also for my sanity. Volunteering at the library was supposed to help me segue into a paying job, but not for another month or so.

At least, that was the plan. But God laughs while we make plans. The hubs lost his job last week.

Obviously, my need to make some dough is suddenly all-important. Not something I can put off till I’m comfortable, which is to say, unafraid. It probably never would have happened that way anyway.

So. Money-making propositions.

Selling soap would be good, if I had listened to my instincts earlier in the year, when those batches would be nicely cured by now and ready to package. But no. The soap I made the other day will be ready in a month, and even then it’s not a sure sale. Plus, I can’t really wait a month to see some income.

Freelance editing is still an option, except many previous attempts to break the ice on that failed, leading me to believe it might not be the job for me after all. Plus, it also would take too long to see a significant amount of money.

My library isn’t hiring right now, unfortunately. I’ve decided to visit libraries in neighboring towns to see if any of them are fragrance-free. I did this last year but stopped after three. At each one, the smell was strong enough to knock me over as soon as I opened the door. I will extend my search, I guess, although any commute over a half hour will be impractical.

A factory job might be ideal, if they don’t produce something toxic. Last year, when I was looking for a job in earnest, they were sparse. All in the medical or sales fields, two fields I will only attempt if I’m desperate and hungry. I had plenty to eat last fall, so after a few unsuccessful interviews, I put off the job search. This year I’m seeing more variety, so a traditional job is a better possibility.

I feel strongly that a way is opening for me, and that it will be clear soon which way that is. It will probably be something I’ve never considered. The Wheel turns. Meanwhile, the hubs is hitting the pavement and I’m editing a book to put on Amazon, maybe two, and getting my resume in order. Whatever happens, things will never be the same.

Scary, but good.

My friends on Facebook might remember a few weeks ago when my bike was stolen, the idiot rode it right by my house, and I went down there to confront the gang of kids and retrieve my bike

Drama.

Up to that point the kids mainly messed with mailboxes up and down the street. Like, you’d see too many doors hanging open to be coincidence. The knob on my plastic mailbox was broken off and thrown on the ground. But we’d never be able to catch them in the act because it happened in the wee hours of the morning.

Then my bike was stolen, and it seemed to escalate from there.

A friend who lives across the street from the bike-thief’s house (their apparent base of operations) had things stolen out of his pickup the same night they took my bike. I told him who to talk to, and he was able to retrieve his items from the disinterested parents. We agreed we needed to start keeping our homes and cars locked, something I’ve never had to do before, and I started rebuilding the broken shed door.

It was quiet at my house for the next couple of weeks, but apparently they were still causing mayhem at other places, because the bike-thief girl got arrested last week. A few days later they ripped the door off my mailbox, and went through and stole items my friend had set out for a garage sale. On my way into town to get a new mailbox, I saw another family standing around their mailbox, which was lying on the ground next to its post.

Since my friend’s house is the only other one on that stretch of road, he’s an obvious target. Well the other night he caught two of the boys red-handed and had them arrested.

In a perfect world, this would be the end of it. The parents would step in, finally, or being arrested would scare the kids straight…but I doubt that will happen. If I’m not mistaken, a couple of the boys are the same ones I saw writing on the playground equipment a couple of years ago. They’re just old enough to do actual damage now, and bolder with their years of small crime successes behind them.

In the meantime, I spent a good chunk of change on a vandal-proof mailbox, and when they learn to drive they won’t bother with us anymore. With a vehicle, the mailbox smashing possibilities will be endless.

Suddenly I’m very busy. I’ve gotten used to having no schedule conflicts—indeed, little schedule at all—because for the past few years almost everything I do is school-related, and they don’t overlap things. I’ve also gotten to the point where if I get showered and brushed by lunch I’m doing well. It’s not that I sit around all morning, but only that I have nowhere to be.

I can feel this changing permanently.

Part of it’s my choice, like tackling some big repair projects around the house, and part of it is out of my control. My daughter has become involved in more extra-curricular activities in middle school, and my son will be there next year. This is on top of the back-to-school season. Another commitment I’ve made is to take charge of my health, which means appointments with various doctors. (I had my first lady doctor visit in about eight years, which tells you something.)

One small (and yet huge) step is volunteering at the library. I started Tuesday, and today it seems like it could have been a dream. I often dream I’m straightening shelves at public places for no pay. Really. I fear I’ll go back in there and they have no recollection of me.

My regular times are Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I have a name tag and my own drawer and everything. On my first day, the lady in charge of volunteers showed me around backstage. It felt strange to pass through that doorway, the one that reveals just a glimpse of the library machinery, and one I’d never considered I might enter. Turns out the working part of the library is almost as big as the public part, only instead of wide spaces and neat shelves, the rooms are stuffed with desks, and papers plaster every surface, horizontal and vertical. It’s wonderfully shabby; clean but impossibly cluttered.

After my tour I was handed off to my boss, (Darlene? Deborah? Oh crap, I’ve already forgotten her name…Yay, got it!) Dorothy. She showed me how to read the shelves, which is basically fixing all the books the patrons thought they were putting back in the right place but didn’t even get close. I will be working in the children’s section, where the shelves are always in flux. So my normal job is to read the shelves, but the each employee I met seemed gleeful about the possibility of using me for her own special projects.

I always suspected my hodgepodge of skills and interests would be useful in a library, and now I know for sure I should have been a librarian from the beginning.

This is a big step, knowing that I can work around people. As far as I can tell, they don’t use any air freshener anywhere in the building, aside from the public restroom. The employee restroom smells faintly of cleaner, but not air freshener. When I finished reading the Beginning Reader shelves my eyes were googly from the shelf reading, but otherwise I felt fine. It could change, I suppose, but at the moment I think I could spend all day in that building and feel fine.

Of course, I would like to work full time at the library someday. But for now, I’ll call it an internship. At least it’s something to put on my resume, and I get to help out a favorite institution.

Now I just have to hope ebooks don’t make libraries obsolete. Would be just my luck to find my perfect job only to have it stop existing. *crosses fingers*

I’m taking this publishing thing sloooooowly. Don’t know if you noticed. I first published Mon Petit Ami in October of last year, distributing through Smashwords. I learned the ropes, trying out the coupons and reviews and changing the price. It was free through nearly every retailer—B&N, Kobo, Sony, Smashwords—and racked up about 400 views over the next 6 or 7 months.

Amazon, however, is the whiny, uncompromising kid on the playground who is ready to take his awesome toys and go home if the other kids don’t play his games. Ergo, Amazon doesn’t give you total control over your pricing when you self-publish and you have to like it or lump it. The lowest they’ll go on any publication is 99 cents, regardless of length, unless you cast some magical price-matching spell which I was never able to figure out. So my little 1500-ish word story languished with no sales, unsurprisingly.

So I started to wonder how the story would do on Amazon. I had a half a year’s data on Smashwords, et al, and several good reviews from complete strangers, so I thought it was time to play Amazon’s game. The only way I could get my story on Amazon for free was to give them exclusivity, so I did.

I found out a lot from my 3-day free promo. Before I did this, I’d thought the reader pool among my friends had already been exhausted. After all, MPA had been free and periodically promoted for many months. What I didn’t realize was how many of my friends have Kindles and would download my story once it was pretty much effortless. I ended up with 77 downloads over three days on Amazon, a number that took about a month to reach on all other platforms combined, maybe a bit longer.

How eye-opening is that? No wonder people play by Amazon’s rules. They have awesome toys.

Now that this promo’s over, I expect my new downloads to drop back to zero. A dollar is just too much for a story this short, especially since it’s my only publication and bears an ISBN from Smashwords—a bias I’ve seen in the Kindle forums that can’t be dismissed.

One anonymous person gave me my first review, for which I am grateful. Reviews are like currency, so every star, whether it be one or five, helps. This one happened to be a fiver.

If you’re a Kindle user who’s been dying to read my short story, MON PETIT AMI, but not dying enough to download it free from Smashwords or pay 99 cents on Kindle, well now’s your chance to download it to your device for free. FREE, I tells ya. Finally. But only through Monday.

I wish I could charge .29 for it, but they won’t let me.

So download it now! While it’s free!

The fate of the world hangs in the balance!

The world thanks you for your support!

(and so do i)

I could do one of two things right now: log into Castleville for the third time today, or write a blog post. Yay for me, making the more productive choice.

I’ve started trying to do that more, now that it seems to make a difference.

You know how sometimes life is just harder? Little things go wrong, attempts to make progress of any kind is thwarted, and you just start expecting things to go wrong? At first you try to stay positive, but eventually you get tired and just hunker down, hoping it passes someday. This is where I’ve been for a while, but it seems to be opening up.

For instance, the library. I went in Wednesday for the daughter’s routine book trade, thinking I’d take the opportunity to speak to the librarian about my volunteer application. Based on previous visits, when she was coincidentally absent to the point of absurdity, I fully expected to miss her again. But this time she was right there at the desk, checking some people out. She finished with them just as I walked up, and though we’d only met once before, she remembered me.

I don’t know why I expect people not to recognize me. I guess it’s because I have such an average face I feel like I blend in.

Anyway, she said July is a pretty busy month (as you mentioned, Fal) and she’d likely be calling me in August. I can’t wait! I feel like this is the first step on the road to actual employment.

So that’s one road block that’s opened up. I’m hopeful more will come.

What about you, any progress?

Well, people, it’s summertime. It hasn’t been horribly hot. I mean, 100+ is a common occurrence in an Oklahoma summer, but not last year’s high of 116. That’s desert heat. We haven’t gone above about 105 so far, but I suppose August could have a surprise or two up her sleeve.

So let’s see, what have I been doing with my not-too-hot summer?

I spent a hundred dollars on a family season pass to the public pool, and by golly we’ve gotten our money’s worth out of that. The pool unfortunately closed early for emergency repairs, but up till this week we went 2-4 times per week. Kept us from spending money on other activities for summer-bored children, so I think we came out ahead.

Plus, all three of the kids can swim now. Abby knew how but she wasn’t confident, and both Jonah and Maggie learned on their own this year, just from spending so much time in the water.

We’ve also been going to the library a lot. It’s cool there, and I can knit while Maggie plays with the toys and the older kids look for books. I put in an application to volunteer, but it’s been almost a week and I haven’t heard back. What, am I so untouchable as an employee that I can’t even volunteer my time in a public institution which welcomes even the homeless to spend all day there?

Surely I’m just paranoid.

Writing and/or self-publishing goals have fizzled as they do every summer. One thing I did accomplish is to remove my single short story from Smashwords distribution and enroll it in KDP Select over at Amazon. They require exclusivity for several months, but after three weeks it still hasn’t been removed from B&N or any of the other Smashwords distribution channels. I don’t guess it will go live on KDP Select until that happens. Still not sure what I’ll do with Black Veil Angel. I’ll admit, I’ve sort of lost interest at the moment.

But school is right around the corner, and that usually means a renewed interest in writing. Summer is for physical stuff, like building a new door for the shed, purging clutter, shuttling the kids to the snow cone stand. When I have all day to myself my mind automatically slows down, turns inward. Hopefully I’ll be able to make use of it this year.