Defeated

Ugh! I have been defeated by my own addiction to work. With a little more than a week left, I know I will not finish my book this month.

I had expected to have some downtime to work on my manuscript during my trip to Florida over the weekend, but no such luck. Then as soon as I got back -- SLAM!

• Two new -- and immediate -- freelance projects
• Author review and major cuts to my 600-page Complete Idiot's Guide (which is only supposed to be 400 pages)
• Five classes worth of essays I have to read and comment on
• Grading and meetings with students
• An extracurricular MLA workshop I'm holding tomorrow to help my students better understand this English language bugaboo
• And another freelance project that has to be done on-site and will take almost a day to complete

And they all have to be completed by Tuesday or sooner.

My husband pointed out that during winter break I'll have nearly a month to work on it without interruption, while the kids are at school/preschool at least. So, I'm not that heartbroken about not meeting my goals with this project, especially since I've gotten over 7,000 words added to my manuscript, which is more than I've written in the last 6 months. And I should have some time over the Thanksgiving holiday to devote to my characters -- after I update all of my grades and attendance, grade exams and essays, and schedule out the rest of my classes for the semester.

Yes folks, I'm your garden variety workaholic. I guess that isn't so bad considering some members of my family are addicted to much worse things. But unfortunately, I'm at a point in my life where I have to go where the paying writing assignments lead before I can get paid for the writing I really like to do. Hopefully, this won't be true forever!