This is a four-minute post. I was wildly successful in my work/life balance today; while I was at the office for 10.5 hours, I still left on schedule at 6:20pm, only five minutes after the last meeting of the day ended. And I didn't do any work from home tonight -- while I wasn't as focused on the book as I would have liked, I did take care of some personal administrivia, eat a delicious frozen pizza (Amy's Margherita Pizza -- I should abhor foods made by a company that specializes in purely vegetarian cuisine, but I'm in love with both their pizzas and their enchiladas), talk to Heather (aka dear respected madam) for a few minutes, and spend about half an hour on the book.
I need to be making more progress than that -- the deadline for the Golden Heart contest is at the beginning of December, and my manuscript absolutely has to be done by then, particularly since I already submitted the entrance fee. The contest is run by Romance Writers of America, the preeminent professional organization for the romance genre, and recognizes the best unpublished romance manuscripts of the year. Even more important than the contest, I want to start looking for an agent, and I had hoped to send out my first query letters in early November. That's horrifically only a couple of weeks away, so I really need to get cracking. The biggest hurdle right now is rewriting the beginning -- I'm putting so much pressure on myself to make it awesome that I'm having trouble making progress. That needs to end now, though -- I'm starting to get impatient, and I need to stay patient if I'm going to make it though the long years until publication. I also need to stay on track with the work/life balance thing -- I'm hereby committing to be out of the office by 5:30pm or within 5mins of my last meeting of the day, whichever is later, for the rest of the week.
Four minutes are up, bedtime!
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