The Chaos of Change

The difference between my summers and my winters is enormous. The greatest cause of this chaos is my need to go to work. Most of you work a 9 to 5 job, 5 or 6 days a week, year round, so the struggle for time for you is constant. Finding time to write falls into a fairly stable slot of the day or week. For me, shifting from the summer crunch of seemingly no time to the far more lax schedule of winter can present it's own chaos.

The things I need to catch up on, or take more time with, seem to abound not only in my online work, but also in my real life. I still have supplies to put away, so boxes clutter my little cabin making navigation perilous. Today, it was raining, so I spent most of my afternoon catching up on burning trash. A whole summer's worth of trash for just the two of us isn't really all that much but it refused to burn hot until the very last, so it took longer than I had planned. Tomorrow I plan to organize the woodshed and make room for the lawn mower and the weed-eater, and likely some other summertime tools. That task will generate more trash so, wind permitting, I'll be burning again. That's a sample of the things I need to do before snow comes and gets things lost.

Online, I need to take more time with Twitter and actually read, and maybe reTweet, some of the posts. Same with Facebook where I moderate two groups, a blogging group, and a writing group and am a member of over a dozen more, both for blogging and for writing or reading. It's rather rude to merely drop a link and move on, something I've been more or less forced to do all summer long. Then there's the other forums I am a member of, and that's not even mentioning the books I'm supposed to read and review.

Oh and lets not forget my own writing. At the moment I'm giving The Making of a Mage-King a final polish before sending it off to my editor. My publisher has expressed an interest in some of my other works so at this point it is a toss-up whether I'll continue to polish another selection or I will pick up my work in progress, Druid Derrick, of which there are several samples already posted earlier on this blog. I do know that later this winter, I'll be going through the edits Whiskey Creek Press' editor will have for me. That is always an exciting thing to do; I so look forward to learning from an editor. I've never spoken with him/her, so I look forward to this with some trepidation as well. And lets not forget about book 2 of my Mage-King series. I'll be getting that one back from my editor too at some point this winter. Having 2 books going at the same time is a bit much to handle, but I can do it. Depending on how things go with Whiskey Creek Press, I may submit another book to them. I haven't decided yet. At this point, I feel a little like a cog in a wheel, but if they do good... We'll see.

Catching up is going to take a while, hopefully not all winter long. Then again, is there such a thing as 'catching up'? Sometimes I wonder. Are you ever 'caught up'?