I’m a big believer in life handing us the right things at the right time. No, really. Stop laughing. I don’t mean that goodness drops out of the sky into our laps, or anything, but that if you’re doing your best and paying attention, things have a way of working out. A little elbow grease, a little divine providence… who knows?

And I’ve never been particularly patriotic, but I’m here to tell you that I have never been so excited about the July 4th holiday as I am this year.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m burning out, exactly. Let’s just say I’m feeling a little singed around the edges. Read the rest of this entry »

The ‘net is flooded with articles about the many pitfalls of working online and how we can be sucked into various time-wasters while we’re supposed to be working. The average person checks email every three minutes! Regular Twitter users lose over an hour out of each work day! Reading blogs is a huge time waster! And so on. (Hey, as a professional blogger, I feel no guilt over classifying blog reading as a necessary business activity, so I gave up worrying about that one ages ago.) (Also, um, you‘re here, and that works for me, so let’s not get into that….)

Everyone is all hyped up about the ways in which your workstation can actually drive you to distraction with all of the decidedly non-work activities it offers. It’s social media gone amok, and everyone’s work is suffering because of it, right?

Hey, dude, not me. I keep forgetting I even have Twitter. I check email more than I should, I suppose, but I haven’t found it to be a detriment most days. For me, the true distraction in working from home doesn’t reside in my computer (though, trust me, I’m plenty able to get lost in something trivial online, occasionally), but here in my house.

Here is but a small sampling of the things I absolutely never did when I should’ve been working, when I still worked in an office outside of the home:

Made pesto. Yeah. Um. I never had an office before now where my herb garden was just twenty feet away. And it only takes a few minutes and there’s just so much basil so maybe I could just whip some up and freeze it for later during a lull.

Got into an argument with my tween about whether or not two minutes constitutes viable piano practice. Her case: Moooooooooom, I played my song twice! My case: You could be lazier, but I’m not sure how, and so let me play right into your hand here and slip into lecturing you when you should be practicing and I should be writing. Oops.

Scrubbed toilets. Look, sometimes when I dash into the bathroom after a large cup of tea I am reminded that small boys and aim don’t always go hand in hand. It’ll only take a minute, anyway, and I can’t stand to just leave it all gross in there.

Organized my desk. While it’s true that I probably did this periodically even back in cubicle-land, it is not true that when I had an office elsewhere that I would often find it littered with my children’s books, toys, and scraps of paper. The mess in here is only partly mine, and that means I succumb to the “this is my desk, not your holding tank” lecture entirely too often.

Cleaned out the refrigerator. There’s a hole in the bucket, you know. Because i just thought I’d take something out to defrost for dinner. And as long as I’m doing that, maybe I’ll just whip up a marinade. That needs some garlic, so into the crisper drawer I go, and how long has this been in here?? Next thing I know, “taking out something for dinner later” has turned into a major excavation of the fridge.

Gotten into a to-do discussion with my husband. My husband is a professor, which means that he’s off work for the summer. He’s doing a lot of work around the house, and invariably as I watch him putter around I feel guilty (you know, because I’m sitting here doing nothing… wait…) and start painting trim or telling him how I’ll get over to the hardware store for such-and-such if he needs me to. These discussions usually end with him cocking an eyebrow at me and saying, “Don’t you have some writing to do?” Oh, yeah. That.

Played with my iPhone. Yes, if I’m sitting at the computer it makes no sense that I’m fooling around with my phone… unless you consider making “White and Nerdy” by Weird Al your ringtone a matter of utmost importance. Hey, I have priorities.

All of the above? Well, that was pretty much yesterday. No problem, I told myself, each and every time I got up from my desk. I’m a freelancer! I can get work done whenever! Yeah, well, it didn’t feel quite so carefree when I was still working at midnight last night.

No need to tell me what a moron I am. I’m aware. Believe me.

I would love to tell you a different version of this story. I would love to tell you that on Saturday night when I was greeted by this infamous icon to the side, there, and the subsequent discovery that my computer had magically transformed from the nerve center of my business into a very expensive paperweight, that I simply got a new hard drive, retrieved my meticulously backed-up files, and went on with my life.

But I cannot tell you that, because I hadn’t backed up my files. Not once. Not a single thing. Because I had an invincible MacBook, and nothing would ever go wrong with it! Because it’s a Mac! And… ummm… Macful!

P.S. Sometimes Macs die, too.

P.P.S. I am a moron. Read the rest of this entry »

So, um, remember how I was taped for The Today Show? The segment aired yesterday.

It was kind of a surreal day.

We’d kind of been making all of these jokes about how you go do a shoot for six hours so that they can make a segment that’s ten seconds long, and then, well, they went and made a segment that included about ten seconds of footage from what we’d done. The fact that this surprised me is testament only to what a rookie I am when it comes to this stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

I resisted signing up for Twitter for a long time. Really. “What do I need Twitter for?” I would scoff. (And so great was my disbelief, it caused me to end a sentence with a preposition. Horrors!) After all, I’m blogging all the time, plus I’m trying to keep up with the blogs I read, and email, and online news, and really, why in the world would I want a place to periodically report on my current status in 140 characters or less?

But I signed up and started following some of my favorite bloggers, and people would often tweet (look at me using the lingo! That’s what you do on Twitter, you tweet) amusing little things, and so I found myself tweeting now and then, and then I got my iPhone and discovered that being stuck in a meeting was a lot more entertaining if I could surreptitiously tweet “This is the meeting that never ends, never ends, never ends…” while I was fighting to stay awake. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Spring Break, people! Can’t you tell?

Wait. You can’t tell? Really?

Oh, yeah. That’s right. I don’t actually get vacation. All freelancer, all the time!

It is, however, Spring Break. My kids are off of school, and in fact, they’re out of the state. (They’re up visiting their dad for the week.) My husband is off of work. Our town is virtually deserted. Read the rest of this entry »

… at least until tomorrow. Hey, baby steps.

Over the last few months I’ve written about a number of organization issues that plague me, so I thought I’d do a little round-up on how I’m handling some of them. And what better time to do that than today, when I just happen to be completely on top of everything. Lookit me! I’m awesome! For heaven’s sake, do not put that down on my desk! Ahem. I mean, um, well, oh, nevermind….

Every now and then I reach a point of clarity and—rarer still—that point happens to intersect with the time and space where I’ve actually done what I meant to do, and everything is as planned. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. Seriously.

Okay, listen up: Read the rest of this entry »

In my last house, I had a desk in the corner of the family room. This was useful, as it meant I could keep an eye on the kids while I worked. This was horrible, as it meant I could not get away from the noise and the “Mama, Mama, Mama!” of everyday life, even when I really needed to concentrate.

As a result, I did a lot of work on my laptop—either hiding upstairs in my bedroom while a sitter came, or out at Panera Bread while sipping tea and being grateful that none of the ambient noise was a child demanding that I get him a snack.

When we bought this house this summer, one of the things I was most excited about was the fact that I now have an actual office. It’s not only a separate room, it’s at one end of the house! As far from the (older, and more self-sufficient) children as possible! Heaven! Read the rest of this entry »

Online, I hang out with plenty of people who do what I do. I know lots of writers. I know a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bloggers. Women who’ve branched out from personal blogging into a bona fide professional writing career, usually after having had a different career but then becoming a mom and staying home for a while? I’m not unique. I know lots of ‘em. Online.

In “real life,” it’s not as though I go to PTA meetings and when I tell someone what I do, they respond, “Really? Me too!” I’ve never had that conversation, in fact. The conversation I usually have involves me trying to explain what I do and the other person nodding slowly and maybe asking a question or two, and then eventually I change the subject or point out something shiny or run away.

If pressed to offer up a website, I generally point people to Want Not or Ty’s Toy Box. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, the things I am learning.

Sometimes I look back and laugh at my prior naïveté. Hahaha! I thought all I needed to do was find some work and then write stuff! I thought that was going to be the hard part! Heehee. Oh, don’t you just want to go back in time and smack me? I sure do.

Whether or not you call it “running your own business,” I have news for the newbies out there: Freelancing is running your own business. And while I suppose that if you can’t accomplish the job for which you were hired, things like revenue tracking are greatly simplified (e.g., you have no revenue), as time goes on your skill set needs to expand into things that start to sound a lot like “office management,” whether you’re working from an office or not. Read the rest of this entry »