Make them happier, I kept telling Grok. Come on, you can do it!

And so Grok did …

I’m getting to know Grok better now; working with him is my 6th career.

Back in 1975 when I was in junior high, we took the PSAT and filled out forms for our future careers.

First choice: Creative Writer

Second choice: Creative Writer

And so I am. “Creative writing” (and what would the non-creative type be called?) is one thing I’ve done my whole life but it can’t precisely be called a career in the sense that it’s never been my primary, exclusive source of income.

Business Insider just published an article illustrating the fact that in the past four years, the most highly-educated U.S. workers are those who, if they lose their jobs, are experiencing the greatest difficulty getting new ones.

For about two years, I was working for a company called Outlier. Early-on, I received opportunities to work creatively with that company’s parent: Open AI — perhaps you’ve heard of them. But mostly, it was just Outlier. Here’s an sample of what Outlier’s paying now, how it treats people, and the type of work that’s going for $7.50 to $13/hour.

Career #1: Any Job You Can Get

I graduated from my disowned undergraduate school in 1983 into an economy very similar to the way it’s been for the past … oh say …

It was tough to get a job back then in the Reagan era. I worked as a stringer for our local newspaper, a radio news announcer, and got other part-time work as a car salesperson and a hospital ward clerk.

In 1984, I got my first real full-time job as the Campaign Associate at the United Way of Redlands Area, which eventually became the United Way of the East Valley, and which I think now, is part of the Arrowhead United Way in San Bernardino, a delightful community centered in So Cal’s “Inland Empire” with a 45% unemployment rate and thousands of homeless people.

By 1986, this upwardly mobile young professional had become the Executive Director of Family Service Assn. in Redlands, which had the distinction of being the first incorporated charity in the state, having begun as a visiting nurse association for tuberculosis patients living in tents outside of town a century earlier.

I worked at Family Service for the next decade. During this time, we launched Home Again Project, an early version of the “Housing First” concept, and moved into a new building with a big storage area for clothing and donated food. I corresponded with people like HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, representatives of the Urban Institute and national United Way, and evil, hate-filled individuals at the Heritage Foundation.

Family Service primarily assisted very low income working poor families with children. We did a lot of good work and this was a rewarding time of my life during which my daughter was born.

Career #2: Writer and College Teacher

At least 90% of my work at Family Service was positive and rewarding, especially working with board members who served as role models and inspirations — not just for me, but for the entire organization and the community as a whole. Wonderful things happened there.

When my daughter Meredith was three or four years old, her father reminded me that I’d wanted to be a sci fi writer. He gave me some old paperbacks he’d had from his time in the USAF; one of them was World of Ptaavs by Larry Niven. General Products Hulls! Nessus the Puppeteer! Oh, how I’d forgotten those simple, wonderful tales. I started writing fiction again.

Oh, did I mention that while in college, I’d been the intern at the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the first female editor and publisher of the Claremont Colleges’ newsmagazine, the Collage, and I’d been admitted to the UC Irvine and Iowa graduate writing programs, but hadn’t attended? I did attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1984 at Michigan State University, where my instructors included Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, and A.J. Budrys.

I really didn’t have much to say at age 22, but I was trying.

In 1996, completely terrified of returning to school, I applied for and was admitted to the graduate Creative Writing program at Chapman University. I graduated with a near-4.0 GPA and full honors granted by my thesis chair James P. Blaylock. I have a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing with a world literature emphasis. If I wanted to use my bad Spanish, I could have gone on to a UC school for a PhD.

Between 1999 and 2005, I divided my time between professional writing and teaching college English classes. I taught at Chapman University, Saddleback College, the Los Angeles Community College District (primarily Pierce College), and Moorpark College (Ventura Community College District). Later, I’d teach at Palomar College in San Diego County.

I was doing fine at this. I was nominated for the sci-fi writer’s Nebula Award, I could sell stories any time to Gordon Van Gelder, my friend who edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I published my first novel (IMAGO) and my first short fiction and poetry collection. I got contracts writing nonfiction books (and was mocked for it by my fiance Alan Rodgers, the horror writer and editor) and worked for McGraw-Hill and Pearson to write text and test passages. One night the McGraw-Hill editor called and said, “Can you write a poem in the style of John Berryman before tomorrow morning?”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t even know who John Berryman was. And I did so and was paid $750.

I paid our rent from contract checks on several occasions, including the three media tie-in novels I wrote for Paramount/iBooks — one of them done over President’s Day weekend in 2002.

Then I became unexpectedly pregnant with my baby Anthony. I needed real health insurance for him, not cobbled-together junk from the community colleges where I taught.

In December 2004, I interviewed with my former boss who will never speak to me again at Beyond Shelter in downtown Los Angeles. We went to the same college, and she’d graduated 20 years before me. I was hired.

Two days after I started work as the Development Director, this happened.

Career 3: Big City Nonprofit Development Officer and Career 4: For Profit Business Development Professional

I did bring skills from my work at Family Service Assn. to raising funds for Beyond Shelter and Beyond Shelter Housing Development Corporation (now Deep Green Affordable Housing).

Beyond Shelter was the brainchild of my former boss Tanya Tull, who was and is a nationally-recognized advocate for homeless families with children. Tanya credits herself with inventing the “Housing First” concept, which means — I know it’s rocket science, so bear with me here — getting a place for homeless people to live.

So, you know, they’re not homeless any more.

Even when I took that job I knew that my little smalltown organization had been doing “Housing First” prior to the Los Angeles efforts.

By 2011, I did put myself out of work (of course I had another job lined up) in order for the housing and 100 other jobs to be preserved.

Beyond Shelter’s demise was brought on by Founders Syndrome, and its financial struggles were also collateral damage in the continuing collapse of LA as anything remotely resembling a functional city — a process that’s now almost complete, thanks to decades of unspeakable corruption.

However, in 2010, I’d been asked to work with several formerly homeless women to help them establish their own businesses in an effort to use unexpended “Obama Dollars” that the City of Los Angeles would have to pay back unless they were used within six months.

Unlike some people whose goal is to accumulate cash, real estate, or “stuff,” my goal is to …

Leave the world a better place than I found it

Careers 4 & 5: For Profit and Cooperative Business Developer

None of the ladies from South LA whom I worked with to start businesses back in 2010 are still in business, but I did gain the skills that enabled me to start work as a business development plan writer, business coach and consultant, and for-profit fund development consultant, work I’ve continued to this day; my most recent contract has been to develop a cooperative business plan for a group of five Black American cattle ranch owners in Texas.

I’ve completed over 500 business plans, pitch decks, marketing studies, and coached over 500 businesses since 2011. Here are links to some of the successful startups I worked with: Rok Cork, Murphy’s Law, and My Little Chickpea.

As a volunteer, I also served as the treasurer for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) for six years, and incorporating treasurer for Book View Cafe (2010), which was at the time, the largest and a very successful publishing cooperative. I am one of the few people in the U.S. who brings for-profit, traditional business development expertise to the cooperative world; I even tried (and failed) to start my own diverse publishing company and a diverse digital commerce platform.

Career 6: AI Consultant

All of those careers used some of my skills. But none of the careers used all of my skills, and especially — didn’t use the problem-solving and critical thinking skills that I applied to sci-fi stories or figuring out how to best teach writing to college students. Did I note that I was awarded Teacher of the Year at Saddleback College in 2018, after almost 20 years of part-time teaching there? What an amazing time: the fulltime faculty had even gotten a rare concession for us hardworking, no-health insurance part-timers. We’d get seniority the very next year, and guess who was at the top of the list and hourly step scale already!

Why … the one who’s living in Southwest Florida right now, that’s who!

Since January, I’ve been working fulltime for xAI as a tutor for Grok, x’s artificial intelligence. Prior to that, I’d worked for Open AI on a creative writing contract, and through the Outlier platform (see above image for how that company now offers “pay” and its working conditions).

For the first time since 2007, I not only have a regular fulltime paycheck, I have health insurance paid for by the company, retirement contributions (been a long, long time), life and disability insurance, paid vacation, paid sick time, and paid personal time off.

And it’s a good paycheck, too.

And for the first time in my life since school, the basic brainpower that I have is being used every day.

I just read the Business Insider article interviewing several people with advanced degrees, including one guy with a JD and a PhD, another person with a doctorate, and several others with MBAs.

My MFA would get written on every contract or grant submittal made through Beyond Shelter to the state or federal government and it would get points every time because it was interpreted as “Master of Finance Administration.” While it’s true that I can put out a mean spreadsheet and produce compliant financial statements, and also prepare organizations for successful audits, that’s thanks to work experience, not a formal degree.

I haven’t just survived the economic and social upheavals of the past 50 years, I’m looking forward to an actual retirement now, and I no longer fear street homelessness as I had during the years the writing game was getting tougher and the part-time college teaching situation getting ever more adverse.

A Few Words For Leadership In “Higher Education”

Part of my thoughts derive from a conversation I had with a retired Journalism professor who watched his department decline to nothing in recent years. His story sounded suspiciously similar to mine at Saddleback College, or that of my part-time neighbor who is the head of a teacher pipeline program in upstate New York (her program and school are also declining).

I have a few words for those trustees at Saddleback College who presided over the devastation of what was a great school when I started work there in January 2000 after getting a call on a Friday afternoon while working as the Graduate Assistant to Faculty Governance at Chapman University saying “We need someone to fill classes starting Monday …”

You ruined your school. You let lazy, lousy teachers take the place of great ones. You allowed backstabbing, mentally-deranged sociopathic administrators to sabotage a qualified, inspirational CEO. You let these lousy teachers’ selfish, entitled attitudes permeate the school. You let them carve out retirement plans for themselves where they’d be paid more for being retired than they were while working. You presided over a school with 75% fulltime faculty and 25% part-time faculty that became the opposite over a decade.

You let people teach in your classrooms who had so little money they were sleeping in their cars in the parking lot and you allowed your worst, most loathed teachers to betray a teacher who was not only “Teacher of the Year,” but who retained dozens of students to the institution and who inspired and supported them to exceed and excel in their own education and lives instead of dropping out and struggling.

The same behaviors and attitudes are behind the devastation currently being experienced in the Los Angeles basin following the Palisades and Eaton fires.

I never gave up and I never gave in no matter how afraid I was, how sad I was, and how dismayed I was by the abusive, lazy, evil, addicted, entitled culture that was all around me, destroying jobs, destroying workplaces, destroying lives, and destroying families.

And, what a lot of the evil people don’t understand is, people who are honest and hardworking, non-destructive and mutually supportive of others and their community aren’t that way because they are “stupid.” They may find it constitutionally difficult to lie, cheat, and backstab. They may have been taught lessons of behavior and comportment that have resulted in their personal health and wellness despite suffering many psychological, physical, emotional, and financial blows.

Starting work for xAI has been the first time in decades where I felt I was in a supportive, healthy, positive environment, in a job where I had the resources I needed to be successful and to perform as a strong team member of strong, high-functioning team.

When I read Business Insider’s article this a.m. and heard how the people with advanced degrees have been struggling — 

I knew what to do and say.

Because I’ve been there many times before.

If you’re out of work with a PhD, don’t take just any job that comes along, but also: don’t stop working.

And, as my grandfather and grandmother said to me one day a very long time ago, “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper.”

I never misquoted anyone during my times as a reporter; I wonder if some of the current “journalists” ever quote anyone correctly.

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