Most of the armored giants have now been disarmed

(Title refers to last week’s post)
I’m exhausted but it’s been a good week.
I finished my Raleigh Public Record story on Superfund sites today. I also finished my special project for a company called Hyperink, a kind of capsule ebook review of Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne (“finished” does not include any editorial revisions). Now the only special project remaining is my ghostwritten treatment which will be tomorrow’s topic (not necessarily finishing, but staying on top of it).
I do have more special eHows coming up, but with no vacations coming up and the other projects done, I’m not stressing out about them.
I am annoyed that I’ve gone three weeks without doing any of my own fiction. It sucks. I am not doing that again if I can avoid it, and I think I can. The combination of the multiple projects plus my vacation was the sort of simultaneous tangle I don’t usually deal with.
Lessons learned:
•Keep doing fiction (I will be making the time up).
•Don’t be afraid to turn down a project if it overloads me. There will be more.
•If I take a low-paying gig, even with good reason, I mustn’t let it cut into time spent on more profitable projects (of course, as I noted previously, with so many low-payers at once, that was hard to avoid).
•The more projects I have, the more tightly I need to schedule myself. I got very sloppy managing my time this go-round, and then started goofing off. Not fatally, obviously, but I wasn’t as focused as I should have been, which made things take more time which ended up stressing me out heavily.
•There are more paying gigs out there. Looking for them is not a waste of time as I sometimes fear.