Thursday 5 June 2014

Moving Along

A whopping 76% of resumes never get read. A quality cover letter is the key to getting noticed.
We've turned another calendar page, and I have continued to challenge myself with new projects. I have established a profile at InfoBarrel, and have begun publishing articles there.

InfoBarrel is a warm and welcoming community of writers who take their craft seriously. The site boasts content on a wide variety of subjects, and is set up to make web writing easier. I'm having a great time learning my way around! Today I discovered one of my articles was chosen as a front-page feature.

I have also decided that in addition to my other work I am going to branch out into offering several services, including writing resume and cover letters, at low cost for those who need a quality document at an accessible price.

I have posted the first of several projected writing gigs at Fiverr. It's a professionally written letter targeted to the specific job you want. You send me your resume and a link to the job listing, and I do the rest of the work. If you are looking for help with your cover letter, check out the Fiverr listing for all the details.

If you are a writer who wants to join a fantastic community and earn a little cash doing what you love, head on over to InfoBarrel to get in on the fun!

Friday 23 May 2014

Vocabulary Building: Chary

I was reading though a document about a specific dog breed and came upon a phrase that I thought was a typo. The description said the dogs were, "chary of strangers." I figured this should have been "wary" but I looked up the word just in case. And it turns out, chary is a valid word!

Unlike a lot of English words, it doesn't come to us from a foreign language. The root of this word is the Old English caru, meaning sorrow. The word is related to "care."

Chary means "discreetly cautious," vigilant, or slow to accept or give something (as compliments or praise.) It could be used as a synonym for prudent, careful, or fastidious.

If you are a person who gets the jitters from drinking too much coffee, you might be chary of drinking several cups of Venti Caramel Macchiato in a single afternoon.

Caution sign by Mike Licht/Flickr CC BY 2.0

Saturday 17 May 2014

Returning After a Break

A path runs alongside a fence in the Kootenay Mountains of British Columbia. A bench and lamp post are visible in the foreground and a greenhouse in the background. Deciduous trees are bare.

A great deal has changed in my life over the past few years. I moved once from the city to a small town in the country. And not long afterwards, I moved all the way across the country to settle in another small town nestled in the Kootenay Mountains.

For a long while we were without internet at home, or we were sharing our internet while we were staying with family and getting settled. During that time I wasn't really able to write. I worked on a few odd jobs for a friend who needed extra writers to produce content for her contracts, and I tried my hand at translation as a favour for a colleague. Besides those few projects, I'd really not been writing because too much was going on in the rest of my life. Family became the priority.

Roughly a year ago I took up writing for Bubblews just to make a little spending money. I had a number of friends who were doing well there, and because the site is not very demanding it felt like a good place to get my feet wet again after a long absence. It also proved to be a good introduction to web writing for a couple of friends who had little to no experience as writers!

If you are looking for an easy introduction to web writing, Bubblews is a good place to start. Revenue adds up quickly and the payout is fairly fast once you reach the minimum. At present, it takes roughly two weeks after the minimum of $50 is reached.

Writing can be on almost any topic; even personal journal entries are accepted. Posts must be a mere 400 characters long at minimum, so those who worry they can't find anything to say have nothing to worry about. And even rambling journal entries will get traffic!

If you would like to try your hand at writing online and earn a little money doing it, feel free to sign up using my referral link. Once you arrive at Bubblews you can leave a message for me so I know you're there, and I will pop over to your profile to check out what you're writing about.

Want to check out my Bubblews content? Visit my profile!