As I’ve probably mentioned from time to time, I launched my manuscript editing business at the beginning of this year, and I’m delighted with its initial success. I spent the last four months of 2013 installed at my home computer in the living room, fine tuning my editing skills and gaining recognition for my efforts, while trying to ignore the temptation to network/blog/read blogs/stroke the cat/make more coffee/play my guitar – and so on.
Ah well, I thought, things will be different when editing becomes my livelihood.
Quite what I believed would be different is beyond me. I do knuckle down and work, especially now the work is earning me money, but the distractions are still all around me. My cats meow; blogs beg to be read; Twitter tweets; Facebook – er – faces. The living room is the place where my partner Andy and I relax, and the home computer was purchased for fun pursuits, so it’s difficult to get myself into the right mind set to work.
I need an office.
Now, Andy and I aren’t blessed with the biggest house in the world, but we do have a large cupboard upstairs, and I now have designs on transforming said cupboard into
my office. Before you get a mental picture of me crammed into a wardrobe, it is a sizeable cupboard – more of a little room really – but it does need a fair bit of work before it can officially become the premises of Alison’s Editing Service. The ‘To Do’ list, hastily compiled over my first coffee of the day, is as follows:
- Re-home the stack of cds and vinyl currently occupying the cupboard.
- Clear out the junk amassed over the years by two dedicated hoarders, also currently occupying the cupboard.
- Clean the cupboard.
- Paint the cupboard.
- Buy a work computer. Ah shopping; I can do that.
- Buy an office chair (ditto previous opinion).
- Move in.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
Blogs to follow on this miserable (in East Anglia) February Friday:
Click here for more information about my editing service.
Click here to add Dory’s Avengers on Goodreads.
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