Archive for January, 2009

Looking for a few good writers   

January 21, 2009 | Comments

I’ve been up to my ears in a new project, and am looking for writers and Channel Editors to help make it happen. I’ve talked to several great folks, but I want to cast as wide a net as possible, so I’m asking for your help. If you’re passionate about any of the following topics and can write a reasonably coherent sentence I’d love to talk to you!

Money Management / Budgeting / Personal Finance
Food
Entertainment
Holidays
Household Management
Kids
Environmentalism
Travel - NEW
Shopping - NEW
Health and Fitness - NEW
Household Maintenance - NEW
Car Maintenance - NEW
Budget Decorating - NEW
Going Off The Grid - NEW

Take a look at Budget Artists for more information!

Can I call you back? I’m in a meeting.   

January 8, 2009 | Comments

Every so often, when I describe what I do to someone, they respond with an amazed expression and ask me “How??”  It’s happened often enough that I’d like to answer here.

Ok, I work at home, with three young boys and an almost-crawling baby underfoot.  We homeschool, and I attempt to keep the household running at a basic level of efficiency.  But use this line as often as a high-powered corporate executive.  Why?  Because it reminds me to be fully present in whatever activity I’m involved in.

“I’m in a meeting right now.  Can I get back to you later this afternoon?”

It’s always such a temptation to spend all day with my head in my latest story, or chatting with readers - or blowing off work entirely to make blueberry playdough cakes and play trains!  On the other hand, if I’m knee-deep in a new project, it’s so easy to set the boys up with one independent activity after another and find that I spent all day doing nothing but breaking up disputes over whose turn it is.

So how do I get anything done, without paid childcare?  Meetings.  I schedule at least one meeting every week.  I’m the only person who attends, we meet at the local coffee house for about 2-3 hours, and my husband gets to have the kind of four-on-one parenting experience that I’m lucky enough to have every day.  Dinner goes in the crock pot so we can sit down and have dinner together as soon as I get home, and I get about 4 hours worth of work done in 2-3.

To make it all work, I have to be prepared.  I walk into the coffee house with a to-do list, my word processor already started on the laptop, and my email client shut down (unless I’ll be using it of course).  My research is neatly filed in my briefcase (or stored online, but that’s another post!) and ready to go.  This way, I don’t spend my work time trying to figure out what to do.  I can hit the ground running.

Goals for 2009   

January 2, 2009 | Comments

Yes, everyone has one of these posts.  But instead of a laundry list of all the things I hope to do this year, I’m going at it a bit differently.  Every year, I dream up what I want to do, and guess what?  90% of it never happens.  The question is, why not?

1. Life is messier than it looks on paper.  When I sit down at my nice, clutter-free desk, it’s easy to forget that the baby won’t always take 3-hour naps at hte exact time that the boys are ready for some independent time.  Kids will get sick.  For that matter, I will probably feel under the weather at some point.  Crises will happen that require me to drop everything and put out the fire.
2. As author JA Konrath reminded me recently, I don’t get to control everything.  I have absolutely no control over whether or not a publisher buys my novel, or my next nonfiction book, or the article I queried.  Of course, that doesn’t excuse me from putting together the best submission package I possibly can, but beyond that things are out of my hands.
3. Goals change.  And that’s ok.  New opportunities pop up, and sometimes when we follow out our original goals we find that the destination isn’t as rosy as we thought it would be.  It’s ok to change course, as long as we do it intentionally.

Of course, I still have a laundry list of things I’d love to accomplish this year.  And the top of the list is accepting life as it is, even while I work constantly to improve it.

My new corner office - and the job to go with it.   

January 1, 2009 | 2 Comments

The Feminists lied to me!

As a child of the late 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with the general understanding that housekeeping was what a woman did if she lacked the education, ambition, or intelligence to do anything else.  Running a household was the most mindless thing a woman could do.  Of course we could work 80 hours a week and slip in a little housework here and there.  No big deal, right?

Ha!

I’ve done both.  Ok, maybe I’ve never pulled an 80-hour work week.  Not even in the late 90’s when you had to put in 80-hour work weeks before the cool geeks would even give you the time of day.  Sorry, I guess I missed out on that bit of geek cred.  I kinda like sleep occasionally.  But I’ve been a working mother with a corporate job, a work-at-home Mom running my own businesses, and even (for brief periods) a stay-at-home Mom with no outside work responsibilities.

Anybody who tells you that managing a household is mindless has never actually done it.  Running a household - at least a household like mine! - is like negotiating Middle East peace, balancing the federal budget, running a corporation, and changing blow-out diapers, all at the same time at 4 AM on the day after Thanksgiving at WalMart.

For quite some time, I’ve been operating under the idea that if I could only get things to a baseline, get everything organized and figured out, life would run smoothly.  Unfortunately, I really need peace and quiet to do that kind of thinking, and well…that’s a pretty rare commodity around here.  Rather than giving up on the idea and just accepting life as one crisis after another, I’m trying another tactic:

I’ve taken a new job:  CEO of Ballad Family, Inc.

Responsibilities include oversight of various divisions including Education, Food Service, Accounting, Human Resources, and Site Maintenance.

Salary: $1000 per month.

According to the budget, there should be about $1000 left over at the end of every month.  So why have we been living paycheck to paycheck?  I have no idea.  I can’t even begin to tell you where that $1000 goes every month.  So, that’s my first goal.  To accurately track our budget, eliminate waste, and stick that $1000 into a savings account where it can’t go wandering off.  To achieve this, I’ll need to examine each area of this operation and streamline it.

I’ll be sharing my progress with you, in the hopes that what I’m doing will inspire and give you some practical tools to use in your own household.

And yes, I even have a corner office.  My Christmas present from DH was a complete re-organizatin of our bedroom.  What was once a storage and sleeping room is now an oasis of order!  I’ll post more about that on Tuesday, when I re-join Tackle it Tuesdays.