I love the smell of an Expired in the morning.

I have two options for the articles that I edit online: edit and approve for publication, or edit and return to the writer with a detailed rewrite request.

If a writer receives a rewrite request, he has four days in which to comply. If the article isn't returned to my queue by the deadline, it has expired. I do, however, receive payment for having worked on it. The writer does not.

Every once in a while an article is so bad, and the rewrite request effectively asks the writer to start over, that he abandons it. This is often my hope; I simply don't want to spend another minute on an article that isn't likely to be much better the second time around.

I checked my queue and list of "Reviewed Work" this morning. My hope was realized: an Expired.

Where Bad Writing Goes To Die

Here's how my online article editing job works in terms of article selection.

After I log in, I pull up my queue which contains ten titles ready for editing. I can select any one of the ten. Once I pick one, I can do one of three things with it: edit/approve/submit it, edit it and submit it to the writer for a rewrite (this generally seeks clarification), or save it back to the hold area of my queue. If I choose the latter, I have 24 hours to edit it.

If, however, I don't return to that article within 24 hours, it will go back into general circulation for another editor to select.

It is reasonable to conclude that many editors use this option to avoid working on articles that are so badly written, they can't bear the thought of spending an inordinate amount of time to salvage them. After all, we're paid per article, so working on articles of this nature cuts deeply into our hourly pay.

I exercised this option today with an article about online banking. The introduction contained these nuggets:

"Traditional banking and all it alludes is slowly becoming a thing of the past." And: "Online banking gives you access to self serving features."

That was more than enough for me to send the article post haste to the Death Pool. I would imagine that there are some articles out there that don't see the light of day for quite a while, as one editor after another throws them into the dark abyss.

Time IS money.

This past week I started to do freelance editing for a company that provides a wide range of material for companies with an online presence.

I copy edit short how-to articles and fact sheets—a few hundred words or so. It takes me about 15 minutes to knock one off. The very simple ones can be done in less than that. I get paid per completed article; the money is sent to my PayPal account .

This work has altered how I view the use of my time. Should I watch a Seinfeld episode or make a few bucks? Should I get together with friends or make some grocery money?

In "Romeo Is Bleeding," Gary Oldman plays a corrupt cop who gets paid a lot of money by mobsters to provide them with inside information. He takes his ill-gotten gains and, as he puts it, "feeds the hole"—his "bank" under a sewer grate in his backyard.

Should I stop blogging now and feed the hole? Tick-tock tick-tock.