And we have now reached the holiday panic portion of our year. Not that I have anything to panic about. My shopping is done and I don’t have that many more events. But I’ve just realized how little time I have before Christmas, how much of that time is at least somewhat scheduled, and how many thing I planned or hoped to do that I haven’t done. Every year I have this mental list of holiday activities, and I never seem to get around to all of them. We’re not talking super busy activities, just quiet time for reading or watching movies. I had books and movies on my list and have realized that there’s almost no time left for quiet evenings at home. I have a library book I haven’t yet finished and one I had on hold just came in, plus there were some of the Hallmark books on hoopla I wanted to read.

Meanwhile, I’ve got that book that I need to revise, but I keep getting sidetracked. At least yesterday’s sidetrack was somewhat work-related. I’d been thinking about going back to looking for some freelance work to monetize my spare time. I don’t want to get an actual job with any kind of regular schedule, but I used to pick up the occasional writing or editing project and it would be good to go back to doing that. It’s a nice way to diversify my income. I’ve come to the realization that I can manage about four hours of fiction writing a day before my brain runs out of steam, so having a way to switch gears and still make money would be nice. But getting out there and drumming up clients would take a lot of time and effort. I heard about an agency that manages employment for creative types — they recruit creative people for companies, and you work for the agency as an employee, so this income isn’t subject to self-employment taxes and they handle paying you so you don’t have to chase down invoices. I’ve been looking at their listings every so often to see what’s out there, and they had one that might as well have had my picture on it. But that meant I needed a resume, and it turns out that I didn’t have one on my current computer. I haven’t needed one in about twenty years.

So I had to create one. I thought I’d take the easy route and use one of the Word templates. Bad decision. Somehow, highlighting the template text and typing over it was not the easy way to do this. I’m not sure how, but adding a line of text that in no way filled the page added two pages to the document, and I couldn’t get rid of them. If I were just printing this, that would be fine. I’d just print the first page and ignore the rest. But it’s being sent electronically.

I ended up creating something from scratch using the formatting ideas from the template. That still took some tinkering. I’ve seen that joke going around about how moving something a quarter of an inch in Word pretty much brings about the destruction of society, and it’s almost too true to be funny.

So now I have an actual resume and I’ve registered with this agency. The lovely thing about all this is that I don’t actually need a job, so I won’t be devastated if I don’t get it. Picking up a few projects would be nice and would allow me to build my savings, but otherwise I can spend my time writing fiction. I can afford to be picky about the assignments I take — strictly on a project basis and off-site, nothing regular that requires commuting. I also now have strong motivation to work on these revisions because this assignment would start in January, and the book is due in January.