Why is it that when one aspect of your life finds calm waters, another always finds a storm?
I have essentially three aspects to my life. There's my home life, which at the moment is just fine thank you very much. My little family unit (me, my wife and our son) have our ups and downs but on the whole, I've got very little to complain about in that department.
Then there's my online life - his one, my blog, website and, of course, my writing. They say good writers are also good readers, but there is so much to read at the moment that I feel as if I'll never get through it all. I don't seem to have time to take part in the fishtank - I haven't even been able to respond to points in individual reviews of last story there, which I feel awful about. I did a general response, but it's not the same.
Then there's my subscribed blogs at myspace - there seems to have been hundreds of posts this past weekend. If I start at the bottom and work my way up, it'll take all bloody day. Same goes for Soulcast. And as for actually finding time to read other authors offerings - hah, you're having a larff, int ya?
Of course, the main reason for my lack of online time is the third area of my life. Work. April sees the end of our financial year, which is always hectic. Our fee earners always see fit to leave it until the last second to bill the work they have done in a mad attempt to hit their targets and earn their bonuses. These invoices come up to me in accounts for checking, processing and posting to the computer system. Normally, I'd expect 5-10 bills a day to be a lot. Friday I did over fifty - ten times my normal amount. God knows how many I'll get today and tomorrow.
On top of that we have a quarterly interest run on client's monies, bank account to be reconciled and hundreds of reports to produce. That's in addition to the conveyancing side of the business going mad as people rush to buy/sell before the government bring in HIPs later this year. (Home information packs - Don't ask). And, as usual, none of the computers work properly and so I have to rush around trying to show people how to do such difficult things as print and open documents (okay, I'm exaggerating, but I'm allowed - I'm a bloke).
This week I hope to be able to post two extracts from stories I'm working on. One will be from "Six-thirty Sleeper to Paris" and is a brand new scene from the middle of the story. The other will be an extended scene from "The Method" (formally Little Miss Movie Star) which shows a snippet of how I now plan to use the character "Kim".
I would also like to post a couple of recent photos I've taken of my garden (if I get time to upload them to Flickr) including the very fist radish of the season, fresh from the ground! And very tasty it was too.