This was kind of an odd week, possibly kicking off an odd month (#SFWApro)

For a variety of reasons, our schedules this week were seriously funky. I wound up working late a couple of evenings, staying out late with friends another evening and taking lots of naps to compensate. Surprisingly I didn’t lose any time—I made the full 42 hours that I aspire to do each week. But the shift in my regular routine was sharp enough I felt very off-balance for most of the week.
The rest of the month may get weirder. Demand Media, for whom I do most of my paying work, doesn’t actually publish on its own website, they provide articles for others. At the moment, they’re shifting between clients so the kind of articles I do regularly have dwindled to a trickle. It’s a temporary measure (I’ve been through this a couple of times before) but like December I may wind up with no Demand and trying to scrounge up other work until the new clients kick in.
Fortunately I have enough saved that I can survive a few weeks, much as I hate digging into my savings. And, of course, the chance to work full-time on fiction (other projects too, hopefully) will be fun, as it was back in December. And there are still Demand articles in some categories, just not ones where I’m necessarily able to write them as fast (ergo, not as profitably). So we’ll see what happens.
As for other work accomplished this week, a lot of it was marketing research: Looking at possible markets for stories, looking at potential publishing houses for my two novels. Atlas Shagged went out, but came back almost immediately, with positive comments (and unfortunately a “but” attached to them). I drafted a new query for a nonfiction article, and came up with ideas for a couple more.
I beta-read the opening of Southern Discomforts to some more people, and got more good feedback. That’s probably the last time I’ll read any of it until this draft is finished. I got around 4,000 words done on the book, but later in the week my energy ran out. I settled for doing some background reading instead (it paid off, much as I dislike doing research during writing hours).
Overall, it was one of those return-to-the-mean weeks. I’ve had worse.