Need career(s)

[Laura]

Thanks, tinyhouse, for the website URL - very interesting guy - and everyone for the books, some of which I have and love, and some of which I now need to get Brandi, another one along the lines of The War of Art is The Not-So-Lost Soul Companion by Susan Brackney, which talks a lot about creativity, resistance, and how to get past the \"this all sucks\" moment.

[Angel]

A suggestion from a fellow scanner-writer...

Always thought that interviewing was a great job for a scanner - writer. It has a short or long duration, you get to learn about fascinating people and what they are doing, AND then you go on to the NEXT fascinating person... who's livelihood you must research and learn about to be able to ask them intelligent and relevant questions in their field!!!

Doesn't that sound fun for us scanners?

You can just start doing it also, you don't need to land a "job" in it. It doesn't take any "certified" training. All you have to start to do it is a recorder, and it helps to have transcription routine with a foot pedal,etc. (or some voice recognition software) to put the interview into print. It would also help to have a digital camera to include pics of the person with the interview.

The objective at first is to assemble a backlog of interviews, say, twenty interviews. Then you would approach publishers in the special fields who would pay you for such interviews to tell them what you have available for them.
You would keep doing it to meet print deadlines without getting behind - you don't have to look for "assignments" from these publishers, you would be free to do interviews with pretty much anyone and then get the publishers interested.

With enough generalized questions, if you're a short duration scanner, you could tailor the activity to being the "Question Girl" and just do one-line interviews for local publications such as being a columnist in a weekly newspaper. In that case, having a backlog of already completed interviews that comprise a blog would be handy to show as a portfolio. To get them, you could stand out on the street and ask any question you want of people, get their pic and what they say and publish it on your blog to start out. Answering the question if e-publishing is giving away for free, make it a private blog and only show it to prospective newspapers/publishers.

Or you could do longer stuff if you like to jump into things and do more extensive research, etc.

So - what do you think of this idea? I think of it as an income-stream idea.