Well, I, uh ...

I'm out of excuses. I'm down to just one plain and simple excuse: I spend so much time in front of my home computer, now that I work from home, that the last thing I want to do at night is spend more time at my computer. So, I haven't been working on any of my personal writing projects. Every now and then I sit down and pull up one of my novels-in-progress, but it doesn't take long before I'm too tired to focus.

I've been reading a lot, however. A lot of young adult fiction, actually. I've been requesting books from the library rather than buying them. I'm reading "Beautiful Chaos," the third book in Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's "Beautiful Creatures" series (YA) and next I'll read "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell (fiction), which will be a nice break from all of the addicting YA series I've been reading lately.

Otherwise, I've been working and planning for work travel, family visits and my son's sixth birthday. I've been busy, just not busy writing.

Work-Life Balance

I'm still trying to figure out an appropriate work-life balance for working at home. People ask me if I'm tempted to goof off or do housework, since I'm home all day, rather than work. Actually, I have the opposite problem: I don't know when to stop working.

I want to show my editors that they can rely on me to work pretty much unsupervised at home, which means I feel like I have to cram 10 hours into an eight-hour day to show how hard I'm working. Of course, there's also the fact that I'm still getting used to a new job, so work that I should be able to finish in eight hours is taking me 10 hours. Not every day, but a lot of days. More than I'd like.

I keep telling myself that eventually I'll get into a groove where I have a good understanding of the science involved in my news reporting. And I won't have to keep second-guessing what I'm putting into stories, because I'll have figured out what my editors are most interested in. Only time will tell.

So, my own just-for-fun, maybe-someday-to-be-published fiction writing has suffered. A lot. By the time I finish my work day, I'm not terribly interested in spending even more time in front of the computer. My poor butt is already flat enough. But what do I do instead? I sit on the couch and read. Excuses, excuses.