[mechanical_fish]

You certainly can get clients through email, and I can think of no more valuable skill you could practice than the art of composing a really good email to a consulting customer who lives twelve time zones away. It is not especially difficult to earn $500 per day with that skill, plus the skills you already have. Algorithms, shmalgorithms.

Your English looks flawless to me, by the way, so don't sell yourself short: you can learn to write like a pro, you may already be there, and describing what you have done and what you are going to do in written English prose is where the money is.

Are you actually a Wordpress themer? Learn just that much PHP and you can get all kinds of little gigs, doing work like customizing themes for people's Wordpress or Drupal sites. The advantage of learning a package, like a CMS, is that they lend themselves to little jobs, because most of their code is not customized and oftentimes the custom code is, shall we say, easy to improve. And if you are looking to fill time for a few months - and practice those vital pitching and customer-communication skills - little jobs might be nice.

Incidentally, at some point you might really want to practice whiteboard interviews, but if I were to do that I would specifically practice whiteboard interviews, not TopCoder or algorithms. Whiteboard interviews are a specific skill all their own. That skill is at least as much about being able to think out loud as it is about what you are actually thinking about. Knowing more algorithms might not help. I have found it more valuable to be able to implement bubble sort while telling jokes about bubble sort than to know what quicksort is.