This article was published when I was making the stupendous fee of $1.00 word -- unfortunately I only had that for a short time, as the internet bubble burst shortly thereafter. Pay plummeted to our entry amount of .05 cents a word, and has continued on its' downward spiral until now I've seen advertisements for writers that pay fractions of a cent a word. Since only the most desperate, untrained and naive would work for what translates to less than minimum wage in Afghanistan, most of what is published on the internet now is unedited, with no proofing, full of spelling and grammatical errors, and as poor in syntax and composition as 50 SHADES OF PUKE.

As can be seen from this piece, some of the subjects I wrote about are still in-progress 16 years later!

In 1999 I started working for Neighborhood America as an investigative journalist. NA was a non-profit organization in Florida that reported on issues across the U.S. using journalists based in each area. Mine covered the North Bay, east to Sacramento, and south to San Francisco. It was great fun until they lost funding. I am posting a selection of my pieces for them; a lot of them weren't copied at the time, so were unfortunately lost somewhere on the internet...