I've received a couple of emails from people asking where I've been posting lately.  I guess I haven't put up a current list of blogs I write for in a while.  So here ya go!

ZoomiLife.com - a blog about electric vehicles, transportation, etc.

sCommerce.com - a blog about social commerce and technology, I am the website review man.

Renewable-Future.com - a sustainability blog about all things green.

Those are the sites I'm posting to under my own name.  Of course, I ghost write for others, but cannot list those here.

The following is written as a "free reprint" article and is therefore open to being used in any medium, provided a link back to the author and this website are provided.

by Aaron Turpen (http://www.AaronTurpen.com)

Here's a list of things I'd like to see either converted to electric or as added accessories to something already electric. These come from my own, real-world experience, so maybe you'll have a list you've could ad to this. Feel free to comment.

Electric Vehicle Conversions I'd Be Willing to Pay For:

A 4x4 pickup truck with enough power to actually pull a mid-sized (weight-equivalent to truck) trailer and the actual ability to go off-road instead of just pretending to, unlike most SUVs.

A long-range, highway-capable (meaning 80mph, not 55) car with four doors and the ability to seat six real people, not undersized Japanese mannequins. I'm 6'3” and 240 pounds, people, I don't fit in your tiny little tuna cans. That's why I don't drive my wife's Honda! Sure, it gets 5,000,000mpg, but I have to use a shoehorn to get in there. Even my ninety pound dog has a rough time with it. My wife, of course, being five-foot-nothin' has no problems at all.

A realistic, 20+hp tractor that uses standard three-point tools and has a front end loader and a useful working time of 12+ hours per charge. I live in Wyoming, so stop the puzzled looks as to why I'd want this.

A cold-weather around-towner for running little errands. Here's the specs: it has to be enclosed, have some kind of passenger heating source, be capable of operating in extreme cold and various bad weather conditions (including high wind and heavy winter), and at least make an attempt at looking cool. Most electric “commuters” and such are made for people who live in LA-LA land and don't have to deal with anything like this. I'm sorry, I can't justify buying a vehicle I'm only going to drive seven months out of the year. Southern California (I prefer the term “Kalifornia” or “Kommunist Republik of”) is only a tiny little piece of America, so stop gearing all your alternative energy efforts towards them and start thinking about the rest of us! I'm sure the Governator will be glad to have some relief from the scrutiny of his very non-green, bulletproof Hummer. OK, enough politics.

Other Electric Improvements I'd Like To Take Credit For Inventing:

An iPod dock for my electric lawnmower. Come to think of it, a WiFi link from the lawnmower so I could control it from my laptop would be cool too. I've always wanted to put an oscillating, red light on the front that makes that little “woom woom” sound. Cat and dog-dooty detection sensors would be an added bonus.

An electric collar that automatically teaches my dog all the obedience and fun trucks you see on TV so I don't have to figure out how to do it myself. A valium-dispensing option to calm the laborador down would be a bonus.

Speaking of politics, how about an electric “B.S. Indicator” we could attach to our TV so that while we're watching debates or listening to them on whatever talk show they're on, we could know how high our hip boots really need to be to wade through their...uhh...proposals. Noise-canceling headphones are my current option of choice, so I'd like to see an improvement on this.

How about an enviro-friendly, realistic Presidential candidate? Something with more pizazz than McCain, but less rhetoric than Obama. It'd obviously still have to be a robot like our current options, but would need some real improvement on personality design. Maybe based on the Clintons in their hey-day: the looks of Bill and the drive and bit...er...determination of Hillary. Or perhaps the beloved Reagans, with the looks of Ronald and the wackiness of Nancy? It's political viewpoints wouldn't matter, since all it'd need is a paint job to switch from Republican to Democrat anyway.

Well, there you have them, my electric improvements for a new America in the 21st Century. I'm sure a couple of these will be a springboard for new inventions, further driving the entrepreneurial spirit of this great country. If you do take off with one of these ideas, please give me some kind of credit. Maybe name it the “Aaronator2000” or the “AaronStar” or something. I'd appreciate that.

I am now posting to another blog site, this one about gaming and tech related items.  You can check it out at http://www.scommerce.com/

Since this is my website, I guess I can be unprofessional once in a while on my blog.  I'm sure you're all interested in what my current projects are, or not.  I think what I'll do tonight is tell you why I love what I'm doing and what that means for my clients and anyone else who's interested in working from home, as a copywriter or anything else.

Working from home is everybody's dream.  So they think.  Most people, after they've tried it, find that they aren't making it, aren't getting anything done, and can't seem to find the "magic" that makes working from home happen for them.  I have a theory on why that is.  It has to do with how we view work: most people see work as separate from their home and when they try to combine the two, subconsciously they can't make it happen and so they can't seem to get serious about their "work."  

I first started working at home back when I still lived in Utah about seven years ago.  I was working full time as a salesman (nuts and bolts, wholesale) and while the job paid well, I hated it.  Stress and long hours were the rule.  I was getting burnt fast.  I started studying website development and back-end scripting/programming and took some online classes.  I have a Computer Science degree (don't ask me why I was selling nuts and bolts, that's kind of a long story and you have to know Utah's white collar climate to really understand) and have been around computers since my pre-teen years, so most of it wasn't alien to me.

I started building websites on the side, though I wasn't really making any money doing so.  I finally landed a big client on the same week my employer explained to me that they were doing corporate-wide layoffs and I was on the list.  So I took my severance, vacation cash-in, and savings and started up Aaronz WebWorkz.  With a new client worth $1500/month in ongoing work, three months of savings and severance, and a little home office, I started working it.  I was putting in 18+ hour days in front of my PC, but I loved it.  The work itself soon morphed into much more than just programming.  In fact, I spent most of my time marketing, article writing, and ghost writing newsletters.  

Three years later, though my wife went bananas a few times over my being home all the time and the never-steady income (self-employment, especially consulting, entails dealing with having an unsteady income), the business was doing well.  I was spending about ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week working and I was loving every minute of it.  Then my largest client went out of business, followed quickly by another one.  Quickly, things started getting hairy.  I wasn't sure what to do and was watching our bank accounts start to drain.  

That's when I made two big mistakes: I tried to keep the business afloat, as it was, and spent long hours marketing to try to save it; and, worse than that,  I kept trying to use back-end (server-side) programming and web development as my main offering instead of moving naturally into what (at the time) was making me more money than that was: writing.  Those two decisions and my follow-through on them doomed Aaronz WebWorkz.

It didn't take long for the whole thing to collapse.  So I went job hunting again and found work through a temp agency to get by.  What had happened was I had totally failed to look at the market I was in, the work I was doing, and the business climate change that had been going on for the past couple of years at that time.  You see, outsourcing was the thing and it was taking place everywhere.  Suddenly, firms of foreign programmers (mostly from India and Russia), fronted by American-based sales teams, were flooding the market with cheap labor.  This was phasing me out.  I just didn't realize it because of the large cushion of well-paying clients I had established.

So the part-time temp job turned into a full time temp job and lead me to write my first e-book that wasn't technical or Internet-centric: "The $10/Hour Weight Loss Program" in which I expounded on the idea of utilizing $10/hour temporary labor jobs as weight loss exercise programs, "so you get paid to lose weight!"  It didn't sell too well, but I didn't really market it well either.  It got a lot of fun reviews and interest from people, though, since it was entirely a spoof on those "get-slim-quick" weight loss programs you're always seeing advertised.

Anyway, the new job wasn't glamorous, but it paid well.  It was highly dangerous, though, and wasn't really the kind of thing I could see myself doing long term.  I'm anything if not adaptable, though, and the job lasted a little more than a year before I started looking to see what else I could do instead.  I decided to go into truck driving.

Ya, I know, how the hell does one go from Computer Science to selling nuts and bolts to owning a successful home business to working temp to truck driving?  Like I said, I'm adaptable and I bore easily.  I like knowing stuff and I like having new things thrown at me all the time.  The job I was in wasn't doing that, but the work at home job was .  Most of what I was doing there was self-learned, since anything you learn about computers in college is out of date six months later.   Truck driving seemed like it would be fun and I figured it'd be a steady income with lots of independence.  I was right on two out of three of those, anyway.  It's fun at first when everything's new and it has a lot of independence.  Steady income?  Nope.

Most truck drivers are paid by the mile, trip, or other performance-based rates.  Sounds great, right?  Get rewarded for hard work and all?  Ya, sure.  Except that you're completely dependent on someone else to get you those miles, trips, etc.  I hauled produce, which meant it was really hot going for some of the year and really slow and included a lot of sitting around the rest of the year.  Two weeks of pay totaling $700 and $1,000 doesn't cut the mustard.  At least, it doesn't justify giving up being at home with your family and living on the road all the time.

So after a couple of years of that, I quit.  In the mean time, we'd moved here to Wyoming.  I won't explain why we moved, since they're personal and political, but we did.  Suffice it to say, Wyoming is the last of the free states, in my opinion.  

After getting out of the truck, I had a great job lined up the next town over and was waiting for the security clearance and to start.  I was told it would take a couple/three weeks, maybe a month to get done.  Great.  Time off to hang out at home, be with the family, get some honey-do's and home improvement projects done...  That sort of thing.  

Of course, being me, I got bored after a while and so I figured I'd see if I could ramp up what I was doing with my writing online.  I'd been doing it here and there while on the road, mostly ghost-writing blogs and things for people, and I figured I'd see if I could set it up to make some extra income.  Wow.  I ended up making a full time job out of it and am happy with it.  Apparently people remembered me and wanted me to come back to them, plus my profile at Elance was never removed and I'd always kept it semi-current, so I updated that and started bidding.

The job I was expecting fell through, much to my relief,  and I'm working at home again, full time, and making ends meet.  It's building to a good career and I'm glad of it, because of all the things I've tried doing, writing is the only one that holds my interest.  Probably because it's not the same day in, day out and it allows me to explore a lot of subjects and knowledge I'd never considered before.  Plus I get to do one of the things I do best: talk.  Only I have to type it out instead of saying it.  Oh well, I'm up to 80 wpm again, so it's not hard. 

Hopefully that's given you some insight into what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.  It's probably shown you how I can help you too, since someone who enjoys what they're doing conveys that through their work, making the people witnessing it (your customers) see it too.

Well, my project list has changed considerably since the last time I posted it and is much shorter this time, allowing me to have a little free time to get a few honey-do's done around the house.  So please hire me so I can avoid that!

Seriously, though, I did just finish a large, on-going project that was time-consuming, but very engaging and fun to do.  It was one of the few where I was allowed to be creative fictionally without writing full non-fiction.  I had fun with it.

Right now I'm working on a handful of smaller projects with a few more starting after Labor Day.  I'm working on:

• Article spinning/re-writing on various subjects centering around animals/pets.
• Blog posts for a geographically-specific blog regarding upper-middle class lifestyles.
• Six articles about retrievers, such as Laboradors and Goldens. 
  
• Short blog post reviews of resorts, based on hand-written reviews done by the client.
• Editing of two e-books (mostly proofreading, which I do a lot of), one a short piece about setting up a not-for-profit/charity and the other a longer one about fundraising for said charity.

That's it for now.  Much shorter than the last list I posted.  I'm still doing a handful of on-going projects (all blog posting), but I hardly think of those as projects anymore because they are so long-term.

Speaking of blog posting, I just finished writing several video-game related blogs that will be posted soon and I'll be sure to put a link here if you want to check them out.  I also finished a series of blogs on alternative energy and related subjects for a client. 

You can read his great blog over at http://www.renewable-future.com/

Well, that's it for now.  Have a great Labor Day weekend!

I've added a new article to Constant-Content.com, where I sell all of my exclusive-use and single-use articles.  This new article, titled "Improve Your Gas Mileage With These Seven Tips" details how you, or anyone, can improve their vehicle's gas mileage with just a few simple changes--none of which require a mechanic or a screwdriver.  With today's rising gas costs, these kinds of tips are a hot topic.

The article is available at for either exclusive-use purchase or for full ownership purchase (which means you can put your name on it as the author).  In either case, you'll get exclusive rights to the article, which means no one else will be publishing it anywhere!  Full details and samples of the article's content are available at Constant-Content.com.

I've also got plenty of single-use and free reprint articles both here and over there for you to look at as well.  So if you're looking for a ready-to-go article, try these.

Thanks, --Aaron

Just a few updates.  I've added the link to Constant-Content on the "Contact Me" page.  I can't believe I orverlooked that, since I've been doing business there for years.  I sell a lot of one-time-use and exclusive articles and writings there.  Stuff you won't find here or anywhere else.  Go there by clicking here:  http://www.constant-content.com

In other news, my projects are moving along.  I haven't bid on any new projects in a week or so because my plate is so full.  I'm always willing to look at new projects, thoug, so if you have one you'd like me to bid on, please let me know.  You can email me directly or through the form on my Contact Me page here on the site. 

Of course, your comments, ideas, suggestions, and even your hate mail is apperciated. 

I look forward to hearing from you!

I guess this is the first official blog post for my site. 

Welcome to AaronTurpen.com and my new blog, in which I will talk about my writing, the projects I'm working on (as much as I can, given legal agreements), and updates to this website.  Let's start with updates, then a list of my current projects.

Site Updates  - I added a new article to the Free Reprint Articles area titled "The Fastest Way to Plummet Your Sales: Dry, Boring Content."  I wrote it after a discussion with a client about the content I was creating for him.  He wanted it to all be written in the third person, rather than first or second, even though it was blog post content.  He didn't tell me that up front, of course, so I wrote the content assuming first and second person would be what he'd want.  At any rate, I re-wrote it in the third person as he wanted, but wrote this article as well, since many people (especially professionals in the business and academic worlds) believe that first and second person is only good for personal letters and diaries. 

Current Projects - Here's a short list of the current projects I'm working on, along with what details I can give here without compromising client agreements and confidentiality:

• Vintage Article Rewrites is the title I've given this project.  Basically, I'm modernizing several old articles on various subjects.  Most of these articles are from the 1940s and 50s, though there are a few newer ones.  A handful were the work of the client's mother in the 1970s as well.  These will be used in print as well as online for a health and wellness magazine.  They're being ghost-written.
• Blog Post Articles on Loans is what I've titled this project.  I'm writing articles on various types of loans for a handful of blogs the client owns.  The articles are short, of course, and deal with loans on various things like RVs, cars, etc. 
  
• Top Secret is the title I've given this one, which is, well, top secret.  Suffice it to say, it's creative and will be a lot of fun once it's underway.  Currently, we're ironing out details on the presentation and logistics of the work, but the contract is started and will take over a month to complete.  
• Personal Blog for 50s is the name for this one, in which I'm writing a dozen or so blog entries, ghost-written, for someone who's in his late forties/early fifties and resides in California.  It's area-specific and fairly mundane in content, though building this character (he's fictional) has been fun.
• Get-Rich-Quick..Again is the name I've given this one, since it's yet another MLM get-rich-quick scheme that I'm writing sales letters for.  These are pretty common in the Internet copywriting world and are, more or less, the bread-and-butter for the blue collar writer.
• PC Book Rewrite is a project in which I'm slowly, but surely, updating and adding a couple of chapters to a book about PC security.  The book is a few years old and needs updates and the owner (for which I'm ghost-writing) is a technical guy, but not a writer - in his own words.  This project isn't in a hurry, so it's a nice thing I work on for a little bit each day to take my mind off other projects that I might be getting writer's block or disinterest in.
• Spin Doctor is the name I've given this one, since it's a basic article spin job.  Basically, I'm taking articles written by another author and "spinning" them  with simple markup codes so that a piece of software can randomize the article a bit and come out with new versions that are still coherent. 
  

Well, there you have it.  Post #1 to the blog!  I'll keep this updated with my thoughts and projects as they come along.  Hope you have fun reading it!

--Aaron