One of the things that I’d decided to do this year was to try and work smarter. The key to that was batching – especially in regards to my astro site, the readers of which are hungry for new content.

What I’ve taken to doing is setting aside the first Friday afternoon in the month and getting all the content written for that month – short daily forecasts where there’s something interesting happening in the sky, and slightly longer do it yourself posts for sign changes, full moons, new moons etc.

So, that was last Friday. Then I remembered that I had a deadline on Monday for some (paid) daily forecasts that I’d committed to writing. So I sat down on Saturday and what should have taken me a couple of hours – 2.5 max – took me all day. Those 50-word forecasts were so painful to write this time! I know my stuff (she says without blushing) and these normally just flow, but not this weekend.

By the time I was done I felt as though I’d run the mental equivalent of a marathon. Why was it so hard? I have no idea. I suspect that it’s partly because I wanted to get back to the novel, partly because I’d had such a productive writing day the day before (3000+ words on the novel in the morning and a month worth of blog posts in the afternoon), partly because it had been a busy week in the partition job, partly because my back was killing me, and mostly because I just wasn’t in the mood.

That’s the thing with this gig though – you can’t just say ‘I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling it today’ and faff about. The bum has to be planted on the seat and the words have to be written by the date you said they’d be written – especially when you’re being paid to write them.

Anyways, I have half a day out of the partition job today, next week’s business trip has been cancelled, and both the novel and a guest post for a friend are on the agenda for this afternoon. First, though, it’s a run out to the airport – Ms T is off to Sydney to visit my parents and catch up with some friends.

Until next week…