Penny for your thoughts.

I'm a writer. Not the glamorous kind, with three-martini lunches and publicists and fan mail and hate mail and mystery. Not the tortured kind of chain-smoking, long-suffering, pale and too-thin poet. I'm not even the kind that works on The Great American Novel during lunch breaks at my ultra-responsible corporate job.

Nope. I'm what's sometimes referred to as a "freelance commercial writer." Or, I'm a word whore. I'll write whatever someone pays me to write. Marketing brochures, magazine articles (both under my own byline and ghost-written), profiles of executives no one's ever heard of. You pay me, I'll write it, from grass-fed beef to new data storage technology.

It's not romantic. But fuck, it's fun. I love my job. I can make my own hours, take on as much or as little work as I want (or need), and there's something different every day. Of course, there's also the torture of invoicing and waiting to be paid. The anxiety of bidding for projects and hoping the potential client will choose you.

But it's worth it. It allows me to be all the other things that I am: a yogi, a wife, a knitter, a sister, a cook, a best friend. My job lets me take my dog for long walks and take half days off to ransack local thrift stores. Or watch awful Lifetime movies at 2 pm on a Tuesday. Or meet my husband for lunch near his office.

I'm planning to write about the extraordinary and the mundane in my life, both writing-related and not.

Idiom of the day: 'A penny for your thoughts.'