Writing for me vs. writing for them

I haven't always made a ton of progress on my fiction over the past two and a half years, but I have definitely had more time to work on it after I backed off on freelancing and started working as a nanny part-time, back in November 2011.  Before that, when I was freelancing full-time, it was as though I felt I couldn't work on my own projects while I always had client work waiting in the wings.

Since I took the nanny job, however, I have been freelancing less and less.  I started out intending to freelance part-time, so I kept on a few clients.  I didn't do any marketing, though, and they slowly fizzled out.

Well, thanks to some significant changes in my life this spring, I started taking freelance work again in the last few months.  Perhaps predictably, though, my fiction efforts have fizzled out as the freelancing has picked up.

In other words, I haven't worked on my novel at all since April, despite it currently being halfway through the summer's second session of Camp NaNoWriMo.

It's a dismal lack of effort, but I'm hoping to turn it around this week and next week.  This week my schedule is a little more relaxed while the kids are in all-day camps; and next week the kids are out of town entirely, so I have the week off.  With any luck, I'll be able to use my extra time to get caught up on my novel goals for the summer.

It brings up a concerning conundrum, however.  Is juggling freelance work and my own projects something that I'll ever be able to master?  Will I have to quit freelancing in order to achieve my goals as a novelist?  Or will I eventually learn to manage the time I spend on both?

I don't know, but I don't really want to give up either, so I had better buckle down!