Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Sometimes you can’t juggle every ball at the same time

Life is an exercise in juggling. We all know that. We have the two very large balls of work and life which sometimes reform suddenly into lots of little balls which are harder to juggle and keep in the air.

This past two weeks has been an exercise in putting down some of the balls and picking up others.

Finding paid work has been the priority for the first quarter of the year. The last week in March was given over to interviews for contracted work. I’m pleased to say I should be taking up a six-month contract once all the paperwork is done. (Not counting it as in the bag until the ink is dry on the actual contract.)

Which means my primary living expenses should just about be covered for another year. Not the cost of the business or the cost of this writing website, but I can afford to keep feeding the cat his preferred cat food. I will still need to keep to economise and stick to a budget especially with energy prices going up, and God knows what is going to happen with the global economy in the next year.

One thing I do know is that time-wise, I am likely to have get more structured in terms of setting time aside specifically for writing as I won’t be able to work as flexibly as I can when I am working completely for myself. My priority is going to be to try to get as much done to prep for the self-publication of the novel ahead of starting the contract.

I’d like to think that all the lessons I’ve learned over the past year will come to the fore to help me juggle all the balls I’m going to have going forward.

And there will be a lot of balls as I’ll also need to continue to separately maintain my business through the contract – or as a friend put it this week ‘keep the reception lights on, even if the factory isn’t in full production.’  At the minimum, I think I will need to complete the coaching contracts I had secured in March, maintain my social media and in-person networking (although definitely not to the same degree), and continue to publish at least an article a week to build my content library. I’m debating about whether to proceed with the YouTube channel.

I ended March pretty exhausted. Hustling for work is hard work in and of itself, but it has paid off (I had a couple of offers to consider) even if I’m not counting my chickens until the contract is actually signed, sealed, and delivered. The exhaustion did lead to one of my most successful poems ever – both here on my website and on my Bluesky account, But today is not tomorrow.

Because I was tired, this week I put into practice swapping some balls which meant putting a couple of the balls down (the business articles I write, doing my statistical analysis across my websites and content) and picking up other balls to juggle instead – namely the two hospital appointments that I needed to attend to investigate mysterious back pain (they thought it was my kidney, turns out it isn’t so back to square one on the mystery ailment front).  

The good news is that by swapping balls out, I’ve managed through April to maintain my 1-1.5k per day writing aim pace. I’ve had to view this as not a daily thing from a time perspective (the time tracking did not go to waste) but over the course of the week getting to 7k, and I think going forward it will probably help to view it as a monthly target rather than a daily one.

I’ve also been using a challenge to get myself focused on achieving that goal but with two separate projects. One of them is a sequel that I had wanted to do at the end of last year for my previous Harry/Hermione Sentinel fic, A Framed Investigation. I’m slowly but surely making progress on A Potioned Affair (almost 8k) so I’m really pleased about that.

Ultimately this week will be about sitting down and getting the next seven months planned out – what do I want to write, what do I need to maintain for the business, what strategies can I put in place to make sure I maintain my focus on writing.

The fact is that I have learned a tremendous amount about how I juggle, how I spend my time, what I don’t do well, and what works for me in the last twelve months. I’m really proud of how I handled last week. In times gone past, I would have tried to juggle everything and exhausted myself.

I’m going to keep putting everything I’ve learned into practice, get my novel published, and keep going with my writing journey. That means putting balls down occasionally and only juggling with what I can manage; swapping balls out at times when I need to fold in medical stuff or just need to focus on key priority balls; and, generally keeping my eye on the important writing ball and keeping that one aloft.

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