Hello and welcome back to the site!
You are right about the Elsewhere board being a good way to catch up and familiarize yourself with the site again. It is true that prospective members are limited in what they see, but we do this to keep our ongoing site-plots, character stories and past history protected. New members have to agree to the registration agreement before proceeding on with character creation, which helps show us that they have given some thought to their fellow writers.
As for an active shop listing, I can look into this, but do to the challenging nature of keeping such a list up-to-date with new shops, their descriptions and their employee openings, the process might become a bit cumbersome.
However, this shouldn’t stop you from going in a direction that you are interested in! I try to keep my character somewhat vague at first, with only a few references to the employment/scholastic direction I imagine them going in. This works especially well since our primary elsewhere establishments - Saint Mungos, Ministry of Magic, Daily Prophet – require additional applications to be filled out for acceptance. These are easy apps but they help you form your character’s employment history. If you’d like your character to work for a specific shop then you’ll be contacting the owner of that shop to make further plans.
Long story short, feel free to say that your character works at an ‘unnamed’ shop, is looking for work or is self-employed. Then you can peruse the elsewhere board for the establishment that fits them perfectly after their application has been accepted!
Our Summer Camp is definitely a great place during the sorting months. It will open up and become quite the hopping place the first of April, but it is meant as almost a training ground for new players and hopeful characters awaiting application acceptance. It also gives our existing students a place to spend their summer! We don’t really use Camp Loki outside of the summer months though, although we have opened the ‘Freestyle Roleplaying’ section to our members wishing to play out different time periods or alternative character histories.
If I were you, I would definitely make an Elsewhere character that you can imagine being open to change. Unemployment is always easy to imagine, a ‘starving artist’ works if you’d like, keeping their employment just vague enough will give you options… the sky is the limit!
I look forward to seeing what you come up with
