Friday 7 February 2014

Gardening leave, week 4

It's been a rough week at Casa Voinov. The Dude came back from a convention with a major case of con crud, ending up skipping work and being very Ill. Then he dragged himself to an interview (he's thoroughly disenchanted with the current place), and then didn't get it, cue lots of morose introspection and generally awful mood.

Meanwhile, after two weeks in limbo, the full-time job for me didn't happen, due to somebody else having more experience in the specific field. I'm a good all-rounder as far as financials go, but I wasn't a specialist for what they wanted. Now, I'm just going to broaden my scope and look at contract/temp work too, and stuff like maternity cover. The only thing I'm definitely not going back to is journalism.

Part of me is relieved, another part dreads the full-time writer thing. Financially, things are going to be extremely tight - I just lost 60-70% of my income, so GRL is officially cancelled until I find a day job. I'll scrape together enough for the UK GLBTQ Meet, but that's just outside the door for me.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to add about 10k to a novel and it's an uphill battle. Once that is done (because it's fiddly work like trying to do brain surgery in nearly complete darkness), I'm putting myself on a 3k/day schedule, which should get me to one million words in 2014. Hopefully, this will be the tightest year financially as a full-timer.

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