Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Sometimes life is a series of obstacles.

Anyone involved in bid work will know that there is often a mountain of work to do to respond to a procurement tender in a very short window of time. It is exhausting, intense, and stressful. It is the type of work I had hoped not to get involved with again. However, the contract work has required me to be heavily involved over the past two weeks to the detriment of everything else in my life.

It is another roadblock on my writing.

I’ve been too exhausted to write after work and any energy I had went to the small tasks outstanding on my own business. Even then I’ve had to delay work there too.

This is really not the place I wanted to be at the start of August.

Having reconciled myself to the fact that I was not launching the book until later in the year, I was still hopeful to get my next story in A Step to the Right series, Another Dimension, written for my self-declared August deadline. It remains unfinished and I feel it is unlikely to get published this month. It is more likely to aim for September as there are still weeks left to go in the bid and I am deeply fatigued after a severe flare-up of my right arm.

The flare-up also makes doing any kind of writing in the evenings difficult. My pain is back under control from the very severe flare mid-week last week, but there are still twinges (even as I write this). Voice to text is not great but I am considering it an option to get some writing done this week.

Maybe I will still make it if I can do that. I also have some time booked off at the end of the month with the bank holiday so that gives me some time back to just focus on writing.

However, I am outstanding on a few activities in my own business – work I have put off for the last two weeks and which I now need to do. I don’t want to let down the customers who have stuck with me while I am doing full time work elsewhere. I am prioritising that in the evenings this week along with re-looking at my overall plan.

The past three months of full time work have been a salutory lesson in the difficulties of running my own business, doing a full-time position, and trying to shift my overall career to writing – especially when trying to balance all of that with two chronic health conditions and a desire to spend time with friends and family.

It is bloody hard.

So.

Taking a deep breath and relooking at everything, I think I need to make some changes ahead. I have been asked to extend my contract and I am going to have a discussion about doing that but on a more flexible part-time basis. That will give me a working day back in the week to do my own business and frees up my evening and weekends to focus back on writing.

I’m also not going to take on any further coaching, mentoring, or training contracts other than those I already have. This will enable me to slowly but surely get back to the writing aspect of the business which I was managing consistently until April, and to develop the online training I want to set-up.

Writing-wise, August is going to be about trying to get that Harry Potter story finished and published on schedule. I’m not prepared to admit defeat just yet. It might be 31st August when it gets published but I’m going to give myself another couple of weeks to try and make some good progress.

It’s the beginnings of a plan at least at removing the obstacles which keep delaying me.

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