You know how it is – trying to complete your own writing jobs when you have a constant stream of really good client work coming in can be tricky. But something good has come out of something bad, as it so often seems to do in life. If you read my blog regularly you’ll know my partner fell down the stairs in January this year, resulting in a fractured coccyx. That meant we couldn’t go and work at our family run home brew shop every Saturday as we normally did.

Now Saturdays used to be work days there as far as my writing career was concerned. But where we’ve had every Saturday off from the shop since January, I’ve actually gotten to the stage where I was able to fit all my work into the five days so I could have a two day weekend. I’ve got loads done around the house and had a clear out to the extent you wouldn’t believe.

Now the coccyx healing is almost complete we’re headed back to the shop this coming Saturday. But I have decided to stick to my usual five days a week working routine as far as clients are concerned. And the Saturday? That will be my day for focusing on my writing work. It could be PLR packs for our PLR website. It could be writing and scheduling blog posts for this and my professional blog. It could also be writing and developing books for the Kindle, another passion of mine I intend to focus on more readily.

Whatever I decide to do (and it could change from week to week) it will be good to have one dedicated day for my own writing projects. I actually find it easier to focus on one whole day rather than trying to slot in smaller jobs on a regular basis throughout the week. Invariably my own jobs get pushed into the background instead of being added into the mix. More often than not I get to the end of the day having completed all my client work, while my own work hasn’t got done. I suspect a lot of writers suffer this same problem.

Anyway I’ll let you know how I get on with this new approach in a couple of weeks – after I take some well earned time off. We’ve got lots of things to do around the home – decorating and the like – so we’re taking an extended break to get it all done. Paint pots here we come!

We had a real clear out last weekend, spending most of our two days off in the office, tidying, cleaning and binning a load of things we just didn’t need anymore. As I’m sure most of you will know, being self employed tends to generate a LOT of paperwork. So we’ve bought a new filing system (ironically mainly for our personal paperwork rather than anything relating to our business, which is already well organised) and we got rid of anything we didn’t need.

While it felt odd spending the entire weekend in the office, we weren’t working as such. This actually felt quite refreshing and since we never get time to do any tidying during the week, it made sense to get stuck in at the weekend instead.

The upshot of all this is that the office feels (and looks) a lot better and more pleasant to work in than it did previously. We are rather challenged in our office since we have an eBay business as well, and that creates its own ‘stuff’ to store away.

I must admit our office is a real mish mash of.. well, I was going to say styles, but I don’t think I could honestly use the word style to describe what we have. When we moved in to start our business we made do with what we had in terms of furniture. We got two huge bits of MDF and laid them across several pieces of old bedroom furniture – a dressing table, a couple of bedside tables and a chest of drawers. Luckily they were all the same level otherwise I’d be trying to type this on a sliding computer.

The idea was only ever to make do for a while, but it’s around five years now! The success of our business (writing, eBaying, etc) has meant we haven’t had the time or the inclination to do anything about it. Having said that we’re now making small steps towards a total office revamp. We’ve got some more tidying and clearing out to do and then we have to think of temporarily relocating onto laptops to work while we clear out the whole office, get rid of all the old furniture and redecorate. Might be a question of going back to working at the dining room table again, like we did when the roof was being done.

It did get me to thinking how very few of us have the exact office we’d like though. What kind of office space do you have for your writing?

It occurred to me today – as I was waiting for my physio appointment to get some advice on the tendonitis I have in my thumb/hand – that we writers ask a lot of our hands every single day. It’s quite scary to think that if something happened to our hands we could end up having serious problems maintaining our ability to earn money this way.

Anyway I met a very nice physio guy who confirmed I do indeed have De Quervain’s tenosynovitis. Not sure how different that is to De Quervain’s tendonitis or whether they’re pretty much the same thing, i.e. painful.

So I have to carry on wearing the splint for another 4 weeks, do exercises every 2 hours during the day and ice it in the evenings. I then have an appointment to go back to see how it is, and I should start using it a little in the few days running up to that appointment. If it hasn’t worked I have to decide whether or not to have a cortisone shot. Hmm. Hopefully it won’t come to that. But I guess we’ll see. Fortunately typing doesn’t seem to aggravate it so that’s all good. Stay tuned for further updates – and do get any hand pain or niggles checked out so it doesn’t get any worse and threaten your writing career.