(Personal) In The Weeds

So the last two weeks haven’t been very good for me, focus wise.

For the third week in a row, I haven’t posted a new part to the Jackalope Serial Company — something that I set out wanting to avoid at all costs. My story for People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction is practically dead on arrival, and with ten days left until the submission deadline there isn’t a whole lot of time for me to work on it. Work on New Fables has ground to a halt while I’m dealing with just about everything else, and the day job has been plenty demanding in its own right. With social obligations, exercise and other things, it feels like I just haven’t been able to get a handle on anything so far this month.

And you know what? That’s OK. There are some periods that will be like that — where things feel out of control, where another fire pops up as soon as you stamp one down, where you feel like you’re working as hard as you can just to break even. But those periods will eventually end; you will be able to take a breath, renew your focus and do the best you can to achieve what you can in the time you can.

I’m knocking on wood here, but I’m hoping that the worst of the busy season is over for a month or two. Last week was preparing for my first on-call weekend, which proved to be more challenging than expected for a number of reasons. The interesting thing about my day job is that there are so many new things to learn; the flipside is that almost every thing that comes up is new to me. It takes time to learn enough to feel comfortable with things, and during my on-call weekend time was something in short supply. It was difficult balancing the needs of my customers with the desire to understand just what the hell I was doing. The plans that I had made for an orderly workflow over the week were thrown out of the window by Friday evening; Saturday was mostly spent trying to figure out one or two issues; Sunday morning was the only day it felt like I could get ahead of things, so I took advantage.

I had hoped to at least spend a little time writing over the weekend, but that did not happen. It was all day job, all the time.

And that leaves me in something of a difficult position with my projects. I’ll need to make things right over at the Patreon any way I know how; I’ll need to shut myself away for a few days this week to power through a working draft of “The Tourist”; and I’ll need to use my newfound powers of Project Management to break down everything I’ll need to do in order to bring New Fables to publication.

So far, the ambitious goals I’ve set for 2016 have had to be rolled back a bit. I’ve taken a bit of time to panic about that, and to mourn the fact that I wasn’t able to do what I set out to do; now it’s time to regroup and re-dedicate myself.

Writing to meet tight deadlines; reading to learn how to be better organized; focusing on what’s in front of me to achieve what I want. That’s this week. See to it! Go do it!