Paycheck, schmaycheck.

It's been more than a year since I've had a "career job" and I'm getting desperate. R-E-A-L-L-Y desperate. And even though I live in the most expensive city in the country in the middle of the worst recession in a century, I recently accepted an (cough, unpaid, cough) internship to help beef up my resume for a good portion of the jobs that I've been applying to, which all have that inevitable "a year of related experience is preferred" line near the end of the "qualifications" section. Preferred my ass.

So I'm currently an intern at Skyhorse Publishing, which is a small, independent publishing house that opened its doors in 2006.

Now everyone who's ever worked with me has heard my "don't work for free" schpeal. However, I'm breaking my own rule because I've been at Skyhorse for two weeks now, and the first 20 minutes of my four-hours-a-day, three-days-a-week internship was filing work.

The rest has been real work, and it's awesome. I've proofread unpublished manuscripts, copy edited books set for print, Americanized a few books, learned indexing, and submitted reader's reports to tell editors whether I think they should publish a book and why. It's all right up my alley, and I do really enjoy the majority of the work.

So, essentially, I'm getting paid in hands-on experience, which I'm hoping will pay off down the road. Fingers crossed!