Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Trials and tribulations are good teachers.

Three weeks into balancing a six-month contract, my own business, and my ambition for shifting to writing overall and I have learned many things.

The contract work is going well enough. I’ve done my deep dive into all things past, got myself set up, and I’m making slow and steady progress. I’m confident in the work and the organisation is lovely. A lot of typical change problems but nothing I haven’t encountered before.

More than anything it is just a steep learning curve. There is a lot of information to take in and absorb; to make sense of in the context of what I’m trying to do and my role. But consultancy does train people in quick absorption methods and you know what information to identify first to really make sense of it. The induction day attended was great for context setting.

The business trip I took for the induction day was also a good learning exercise because it reminded me of all the problems in trying to do anything outside of work when travelling except resting in those moments when you’re not travelling or working. My chronic conditions just don’t really allow for any energy to be available for writing in the evening, for example.

Or for doing work for my own business. That has been going well in some places. Context switching on work days when I have finished the contract work and doing coaching, or doing a coaching session in a lunch break, is actually fine. I’m learning to leave enough time before the sessions to just ensure I can swap between technologies smoothly and ensuring I’ve prepped the day before.

There is a problem in finding time and energy to write notes, articles, and other things during working days. I’ve found I’ve had to pick up the slack at the weekends to date. And when my body decides to revolt and give me a migraine I lose even more time.

However, I am giving myself grace here. Going back to the contract work means more fatigue and re-learning how to balance everything. I need to build up stamina again to work in the more structured way that a workplace requires. So I am allowing myself time and rest when needed even if that means deprioritising some work and, unfortunately, some writing.

My main unhappiness presently is with the fact that I have struggled to write in amongst all this learning about how I can balance my two paying jobs effectively. I am learning how to juggle those and while there are no doubt even more lessons to learn, I have a plan and I have structures and systems now to make that work.

I need to throw the ball of my writing back into that juggling act though. There are two things of import in my mind: progressing the novel to actual publication and continuing to provide regular material to my website. 

On the latter, I had been doing a good job pre-April challenge with traffic. There is no doubt that my Harry Potter The Promise Interlude series was part of that success as I was writing a story fairly regularly and that consistency drove audiences. I’m pleased with the pieces I have been able to publish in the past six weeks but I’m not satisfied that these were the pieces I wanted to write in the first place. I have new tactics for this coming week and I’m hopeful that they will help provide some boundaries to my time to enable me to focus on the stories I want to write to support the website.

On another note, I am also scheduling time this week to focus in on the novel and really try to get things moving again. I need to find a good book cover artist and that is going to be my main task this week (if anyone has any recommendations I’d love to hear them).

I know my re-plan to publish in July is sensible but July is only six weeks away and in reality if I publish when I want to publish I only have eight weeks to get things finalised and sorted. Which means that realistically, it would be great to have identified and sorted pre-release readers/reviewers too by next week.

So much to do. It is a learning experience and that’s OK. I’m learning how to balance which is my May goal. Some days it goes better than others, but every day is a new day and a new learning opportunity.

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