All last week I crammed and crammed as much work in as possible. This was unbelievably stressful. The fact of the matter was we needed the money, and I tried my hardest to just get as many jobs in as possible. The inevitable happened when it all caught up to me. I was bound to fail, and I absolutely set myself up for it. In the field of freelancing, you get paid per job you finish. You don’t often get paid hourly, though I’m fortunate to have a few of those opportunities. For the most part, however, everything else is per accomplished piece. Just so there’s no misconceptions, the pay per job is generally very low. The average being about $2-$15 per job. So with the recent need I just accepted everything offered and worked like hell to get to everything while maintaining basic necessary things I have to do. Unfortunately that means I gave up my idea of doing my Halloween novel for this year. Maybe next year.

What did I fail? I had my first very unhappy client. This was worse because I gave him one awesome article and then proceeded to give him the worst article of my life. (To be clear, it was so bad in comparison that he suggested that I might have outsourced the job elsewhere.) I owned my mistake. I simply said it was rushed. That was partially true, I did rush it. I don’t even remember if I proofread it, and honestly I’m too ashamed to even look. I don’t give excuses, the fact of the matter is I failed and that’s really all that is important. All I got out of last week is a house I’m still trying to catch up with the cleaning. Moving forward from that, I haven’t completely learned my lesson. Trying to juggle everything at home with everything I need to do for my career is becoming increasingly tiring on me, physically and otherwise. It isn’t easy with 2 dogs and a toddler. I’m yelling more than I have ever yelled in my life, because I’m probably too stressed to deal with things that I normally was fine with. I don’t even really get any downtime to decompress, which is probably just a huge part of this snowball.

My house is a disaster, and it normally is at least pretty neat. That frustrates me because I don’t have as much time as I would like. My toddler is only getting more active and the dogs just get so wild. I end up having to stop everything to handle a tantrum or because my toddler decided to jump off the furniture and smack his chin so it has a really awesome bruise on it for when the developmental specialist comes by tomorrow. All this stuff with the specialists and the tests, the idea of how much this will cost isn’t helping my stress because my worrying about costs is making me hurry through everything. Hence, the bad article.

I had every intention of doing NaNoWriMo this year. Have? Had? I want to, because I know that if I dedicate myself to it I can easily win it again, and hopefully I can win one of the marketing packages for it so I can get a stepping stone into selling my 3 other e-books. (All available on the Kindle. There’s a link on the side that says “Buy My Work” that will lead you right there.) I know I have another good idea for the novel. I know that I have the talent. I just need time. Right now my option seems to be doing my work during the day, novel at night and sleep when I’m dead.

It would be easier if I just called it quits and went on to just raise the kids, clean the house, and do all the stuff a stay-at-home mom that doesn’t try to work from home does. Realistically, it’s not like I make a huge amount doing it anyways. I’ve never done the easy thing before, why would I start now? Things don’t just happen if you sit on your butt all day. Things require action, it requires you to go after what you want. If you expect things to change on a wish while eating junk food on the couch, then you don’t deserve my sympathy for nothing changing. It’s all about going out there and changing things for yourself.