Archive for October 1, 2019

writing life

Resetting

I ended up not going on that trip, but I did let myself function kind of on a vacation schedule yesterday. When I checked the hotel again over the weekend to make the final decision, the rates had really shot up, and I didn’t want to go that badly. I’d only picked that place because it was one of the few places I could get to in an easy road trip distance where there might be things to do in summer-type weather. Now that fall might be almost upon us, finally, for real, starting next week, I think I’ll just do more of a fall trip a little later. I’ll go up to the mountains in Oklahoma and do a little hiking.

Instead of going somewhere, I’m treating this like a reset week. I’ve got a short story started that I want to finish, and then I’m doing a lot of work-related reading, both research for a book and some business-related things that I need to figure out and learn to do better. If I don’t want to have to resort to a day job, I need to find a way to make more money from the books I’ve already written, which means more publicity. And I need to figure out good ways to do that in today’s environment that I can live with, and I need to make plans and schedules to actually do things. Just as I do with travel, I make a lot of plans, but then don’t get around to carrying them out. Putting the plans on a schedule may help.

Meanwhile, there’s housework, and I’m trying to remember to make time for fun. I want to keep up a good work schedule throughout the fall, but I don’t need to push myself so hard that I don’t have time to enjoy myself some. I’ve almost reached the number of work hours I had for all of last year, so I’m doing pretty well, but I want to keep going instead of slacking off.

The plan for the rest of the year is to keep working but also let myself breathe since I’m not on a tight deadline. I have a lot of stuff to figure out about my career and what I want to do next. I’m coming up on one of the deadlines I set for myself to make some decisions, and I haven’t reached some of the milestones that I set as conditions for what decisions to make. Now I have to decide if I want to hold myself to those conditions, and that means figuring out what I really want and what I can reasonably do.