It's official!

My "office" is right here . Because this is also my house, all business will be transacted off-site, but I'll write the press releases and marketing plans right here!

This morning I filed paperwork with Riverside County and the City of Jurupa Valley to officially launch my business, Pen Porter. This is a name I came up with 10 years ago for what I knew would someday become a writing business. There are so many forms of writing, and 10 years ago, I wanted to take them all on. Fast forward 10 years. With the rise of social media and the fantastic growth of the Internet since then, there are even more forms of writing. And I still want to do it all, but I will probably mostly be writing press releases to help other small to medium-sized businesses grow their companies. But if you need someone to write a blog post, a letter to your customers, a white paper, to research and report in-depth on a topic, create a marketing plan, help you make a presentation to your local city council or other goverment agency or manage your social media outreaches, I can do that too!

I remember the exact date I came up with the idea to launch Pen Porter. October 8, 2003. The day before this, I had been rudely dismissed from my job as editor of the Hesperia Star. I'd spent several hours at a boring executive committee meeting conveniently scheduled on Tuesday, which would otherwise have been my day off at the Star. I was heading back home, when the editor of the Daily Press called me, and asked me if I could come back to the office. (This editor served as my supervisor, as the Star was inserted into the Daily Press on Tuesdays.) Once I got back to the office, I was terminated.

This was devastating, and I now faced a lengthy search for a new job. That job didn't come for awhile, and a job I liked having took even longer to find. But first, my husband and I had a more pressing problem. We still had to move out of the rental home that had just been sold out from under us, and into our friend's extra bedroom. We ended up staying with our friend much longer than we had anticipated!

Once we were settled into our friend's home in Victorville, Cailfornia I set out to become a magazine freelance writer. That was a lot harder than I thought it would be! I eventually sold two magazine articles to nationwide magazines, and probably would have been even more successful had I continued persuing it as hard as I did that first year. But it was mostly a lot of running around tracking down stories that, for whatever reason, magazines that had an interest ended up not buying.

In the meantime, we relocated to an apartment in Adelanto, California and then to Riverside, California when it became clear my husband would be working full-time for the Air National Guard for more than just a few months of temporary assignment. He actually was given a series of temporary assignments that lasted more than five years. But when we moved to Riverside, our rent was about double what it had been in Adelanto. So, to make ends meet, I found a customer service job at a horrible company called Starcrest of California, a job I was able to endure for about one year.

When Starcrest came to an end, we had a new housing dillema, although this one we had several months to resolve. Even though we had thought living in an apartment would solve the problem of the lanlord deciding to sell to a new owner, it did not. Our apartment was converted to condos, and again sold out from under us. Although the new owner had planned it as an investment, and would have been happy to keep existing tenants, because he had opted to buy some expensive upgrades the original condo owners/property managers were pushing, he could not have tenants until the upgrades were complete. An that meant we had to go somewhere else.

Although we had not qualified for the financing to buy our own apartment, we did get financed for a larger and better condo elsewhere. Elsehwere was a place that at the time, we considered a part of Riverside even though it was outside the city limits. Five years after we moved to "Jurupa Hills" it became part of California's newest city, the City of Jurupa Valley.

Buying this condo caused us to have a mortgage payment even higher than what our rent had been. That same rent just over a year before had doubled from what we previously were paying. Thankfully, before that happened, I had already obtained work as a public relations executive for Dameron Communications in San Bernardino. During this time, I learned a lot about this other form of communications. My specialty was writing media releases, which I did so well the Los Angeles Times once turned one of them into a 1,200 word front-page story, and the Los Angeles television stations frequently found them worthy enough to come all the way to the Inland Empire to cover. And as for the Inland Empire media, they will never forget me. I provided them with so many story ideas!!! And still do.

Unfortuantely, Dameron Communications is in San Bernardino. We had as a major client, the San Bernardino Redevelopment Agency. Now, if you follow what's going on in California government at all, you know that all California redevelopment agencies have been eliminated by state order, and that the City of San Bernardino is bankrupt. There went one client. Actually two, because the Rialto Redevelopment Agency also had to stop using our services. For other reasons related to the greatest recession of our lifetime, some of Dameron Communciations' other clients also decided to stop using our services. And that meant the owner of Dameron Communications eventually had no need of his employees' services.

In that wonderful recession, which had also caused my husband's temporary assignment to end sooner than he had hoped, I found myself job-hunting again. I am thankful for two things. 1) That there are mortgage modifications that allow you to substantially reduce the mortgage payment on a home purchased in 2006 and 2) The federal government allows people to receive unemployment for an extended period of time, far beyond the six months the state of California would be able to provide.

However, there does come a time when you have to stop thinking that new job will come. That time has come for me. I HAVE the perfect new job, it just is paid by more than one person. There have so far been six companies who need my services, some of them on an ongoing basis.There are probably more, and I will find them soon. If you're reading this and are a small to medium sized business owner, you may need my services.

As of today, they are provided by Pen Porter, the newest public relations and marketing company in the world, and the newest business in Jurupa Valley.

I won't be the newest business in Jurupa Valley for very long though. This city, born two years ago in very difficult economic times, has faced severe challenges to its business climate and even to its very existence. But there are signs everywhere that business is improving. Jurupa Valley Pharmacy, which opened earlier this year, is the owner of some of those signs! These new businesses (including, perhaps, mine) will be the life blood for the City of Jurupa Valley, and even if the city itself doesn't make it, these new businesses are going to make Jurupa Valley a better place to be. I am so excited and honored to help with that process.