Unexpected expenses

Perhaps the biggest truth about freelancing is that you can't always anticipate your income.  Well, neither can you always anticipate your expenses... especially when your livelihood depends on a fickle thing called a computer.

Thursday night (okay, early Friday morning) when I went to bed, my computer was working just fine.  Friday morning (err, afternoon) when I tried booting up again, the keyboard suddenly didn't work.

Yes, I killed another keyboard.  This seems to be a theme for me.  Apparently being typed on all day is hard on them.

Anyway, this is the second time I've killed a keyboard on my beloved Sony Vaio, which I have had for four years now.  The first time I wore out the hinges on a few of my most-used keys, like A and S and T.  This time, anytime I pressed a key, it thought I was holding it down, which locked everything else up.

Just coasting along

It has been nearly a year since I last blogged.  Rather than to tell you, "I'm back!" -- something that has been proven wrong every time I've said it -- I want to tell you about what I have been doing.

The truth is, although I've been really busy, sometimes I feel like I don't have much control over my time.  I've just been coasting along, and I want to change that.

I've made a couple of changes recently that I'm hoping will help with that goal.

Why I need better time management

I am procrastinating while I write this.

By reading an article about procrastination.

Specifically, why writers procrastinate.

My long-term goals

It occurred to me after my last post, about weeding unnecessary and unhelpful things from my life, that I should probably ask myself the question, What ARE my long-term goals?

Of course, as I'm sure is the case with everyone, that's not a simple question -- nor does it have a simple answer.  But I'll take a crack at answering it, because I think it'll help me do more weeding.

Weeding

Yesterday I mentioned all the goals that I'm juggling: freelancing, blogging, working on my novels, ebook ideas, projects around the house, riding more frequently, practicing the piano, reading... and that's on top of the work I do with kids and at the barn.  It's too much to manage a lot of the time, and as a result about half of those things fall by the wayside at any one time.

The solution is, of course, to do fewer things... but I have to confess, I like having lots of interests.  I don't want to completely give up some things in order to spend more time on others.  So what I need to do, for me, is figure out what things I'm wasting my time doing -- and get rid of them.

Busy summer

My apologies for neglecting my blog this summer.  Even though I was no longer nannying regularly, I had picked up a couple of new families on an as-needed basis.  In addition, halfway through the summer V. and A.'s parents started asking for my help here and there.  And in the gaps in between, I was freelancing, working at the barn, doing projects around the house, and trying to carve out some free time here and there.

As a result, I was fairly busy until the kids went back to school this week.  Not as busy as I've been in previous summers -- not as busy as last summer -- but still busy enough that I completely forgot to blog all summer.

NaNoWriMo at Denver Comic Con!

This past weekend was Denver Comic Con.  I should have posted sooner, but I haven't been very good about maintaining my blogs, and by the time I thought about it Comic Con was underway -- and then I was too busy to post before the end.

My co-ML for the Denver region, who is fantastic and has been an ML for many years, arranged with Comic Con for us to have a table there again, like we did at last year's Comic Con.  And this year, I was on a panel to talk about NaNoWriMo!