Life in the Jungle

I admit it: this is my first foray into the world of blogging, of providing Web site content, of uploading and downlinking. As a member of the Writer's Row community, I've found myself suddenly tossed headfirst into a pretty deep pond. I'm looking at Google AdSense ads, Amazon Associates, eBay Affiliates, e-book publishers and a myriad of other Web sites, all to promote myself as a freelance writer, and, of course, make money. It's bewildering.
I've always written in old-fashioned ways. I started out writing in spiral notebooks and legal pads. There is no telling how many of my high school notebooks started out in one subject, and degenerated into the beginnings of a romance or sci-fi novel. That was the best way to beat the system. I got busted for reading books in class that were unrelated to the class itself. Even the artists who drew in their notebooks occasionally got in trouble. So, I figured, if I looked busy writing in my notebook, I was bound to be left alone. It worked like a charm. Still does, in fact. As long as I look like I'm working on something legitimate, I can usually get away with it. I'm most prone to sneak around like that at the end of the day when there's no way I can start anything constructive, but my boss has to see me looking busy, busy. But, I digress.
It was a great day when we finally got a computer and I could commit all my writing urges to the digital format. So, I left behind the world of spiral notebooks and entered the universe of Word. Now, I'm looking at publishing my own Web pages and getting click-through revenues from banner ads. As I said above--it's bewildering. I had a long dry spell when I didn't write anything. But then, about three years ago, I got the urge to write, and I haven't stopped. The creative floodgates just blew wide open and the tide hasn't gone out yet.
But now, I'm struggling with WYSIWYG HTML editors and dealing with accounting issues from possible sources of income that won't take out taxes. Yikes. I am not an accountant. I can balance my checkbook and do my taxes, as long as I have the good folks at Turbo Tax to help me, but I really don't have a clue beyond that. And I'm working 40 hours a week at a "regular" job. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, all of a sudden. So now, I have to get an "about me" page up at Writers Row, which I'm working on, and see about getting the darn thing to make money!
By the way, if anyone still uses floppy disks, like I do, there is a delightful little freeware program called "FlopShow" that will recover corrupted files. Handy dandy little tool. And it's free, which most of the other recovery programs are NOT. Just thought I'd pass along that bit of helpful information. It recovered a Word file for me that the computer was telling me was not recoverable. So that's my handy tip for the day.
Maybe I'll have more useful links on here, eventually. Maybe a link to a burgeoning romance novel that made it past the spiral notebooks... In the meantime, I'm looking at good machetes for hacking away at the underbrush. I'm slapping the mosquitoes, here in the Web jungle.