Last 7 months have been a ride.
I got my A+ Cert, looked for tech jobs, but in the meantime started working for my friend's boardgame store making enough money to get by while living with my parents. They eventually made me manager and gave me a tiny raise, was still barely above minimum wage.
Early July finally get an offer to work a contract gig for this cellphone repair company. Basically would go in each day and have a number of jobs lined up and I just go to the location and do them. Sounds good enough. Well, they say they can't hire me because my car is too old. Then they call me back a couple of days later and say that's not an issue but since then they've filled the job but it should be opening up again soon. It was weird, but I wasn't picky at this point. They said training will probably take a while.
So I tell the manager at the store I'm working that I've got an offer elsewhere and want to do whatever to make the transition easy. He decides to simply stop scheduling me. Should have spoken up at this point, but there had been some stupid drama at the store and I figure I may as well enjoy a couple of weeks off. I tell the owner anyways just so he knows what is going on.
It's finally at the end of July I get training scheduled out of town. They put me up in a hotel and promise to pay me 100 buck for my time. It goes pretty well, I'm not perfect, but the guy says I'm doing well enough to get out there. So they send me back to my town and I try to schedule the ride-along with the city lead and that's where it goes to crap. He says maybe in a couple of days. Then he just straight up tells me they don't have work for me but hopefully will soon. I'm not given a timeline for when I might be needed. At this point I've signed an insurance liability policy that's $55 a month.
Fast-forward a month and I haven't heard anything and I get the insurance bill in the mail. I contact the insurance company, tell them the situation, and cancel the policy because I'm not going to pay for something I haven't used. They're super nice about it. I contact the company, which still hasn't payed me the initial $100 or basically spoken to me at all in a month and I basically get thrown off to someone else who hasn't gotten back to me yet.
Same person stars asking me for a picture so they can make me a badge, not getting the whole part where I say I've not been paid, haven't gotten contacted about working, and basically told her I have to move onto finding other opportunities. I'll contact them again in earnest next week, but I'm basically done at this point. Just want my $100 and to hand back the tools they gave me (which are more worth than $100, so hopefully they'll have incentive to pay me.
My mom has been telling me about trying some online or remote work for a while now and finally I look more into it and it sounds like it might actually be a great fit so I borrow some money from her to start taking a Facebook ad course I could work on both remotely and with people in my city, and then start investigating some other options. One of those options is finally writing and self-publishing a book, so I've started that on earnest on the side.
I'm also thinking about launching a new website with more of a niche focus for several reasons. I have moderate traffic to Creative Criticism, but one thing I didn't realize that now hurts me is that a lot of ad companies look to see if you're just copying other people's work, which I'm not, but the problem is that they don't know that because I post everything here as well, so the bots just see my work on this site and assume I'm plagiarizing. The thing that would suck about the new site is I won't be able to post the content here, but that's just the nature of the beast if I want a website where I can make some money. Still, it'll be a niche topic, so I'll probably still post movie stuff here.
I do want to be engaging here more, but I need to start getting cash-flow so I'm spending time I would have spent writing here working on getting some income by writing that book, which takes up most of my writing energy for the day as I'm rebuilding that writing stamina I used to have. In the meantime I'm trying to see if I can sell stuff on Ebay and maybe work more limited hours at my friend's store again just to have some income.
At this point I'm tired of applying for traditional jobs and not even getting called back for an interview. I've not been making money for a month and I need something, even if it means I'm basically looking at going into business for myself, essentially. I feel a lot more hopeful about this situation but know it'll probably require a growth period as I figure this all out. Only real concern is insurance, but once I start making enough money again, I'll start looking at government health care or something similar.
TL,DR: Worked at my friends board game store until July, spent July trying to get in with tech company, didn't work out, now just going to start doing Facebook ads and write a book to make money and thinking about launching a website.