Thursday, July 9, 2009

Two Weeks of Freedom

happy girlAs those who follow my blog may have heard me complain about in the past; the small company that I work for has been having some cash flow issues of late, as have many business both small and large around the world. After careful consideration, I am going to stick it out here even though I am unhappy for many reasons outside of the bounced/late paychecks, there are certain flexibility capabilities that I'm not willing to trade at this time...and the economy sucks anyways. There is one more shoe left to drop, but I've been told my job is safe. I will detail that particular story next week, after the other shoe has dropped.

Anyhoo, I am two weeks behind on pay as of Friday and will not see anything until August. However, everyone is getting two weeks off during July. Paid. This isn't a forced vacation where no one gets paid. This is a forced vacation to make up for late payment. Half the staff has off this week and the other half, which is the group that I am in, gets the week after off. Then I'll work another week and then have the last week of July off.

Sooo...I'm sort of going to be a full time writer!! I say "sort of" because I have to work on school and the company that my friend, Jill, and I are starting.

To work on

My goal is to work on writing for four hours, the website for four hours and school for two hours. That's a ten hour day, which with commuting is how much extra time I will have.

That is what I will do with my two weeks of freedom. :) I hope, by the end of the month, to be up to 70k words and to have some semblance of a rough draft done for every section, also Phase Pre-Alpha will be done on the website.

Normally I'd want to be hopping around on the beach as the sun sets behind me, as the girl above, but since I am going to have no income from mid-June through early August, I have to stick around town. Luckily Chicago is a fun city and I have tons to keep me busy :)

What would you do with two weeks of freedom?

13 tidbits:

Tia Nevitt said...

Aah, an at-home vacation. Those sound so fun!

Michelle D. Argyle said...

Wow! Living a dream! Good luck with everything, Lauren. :)

Lauren said...

@Tia- should be fun. i am looking forward to getting caught up on all this stuff!

@Glamis- not a dream. I'm the primary breadwinner and am going 6 weeks with no income, so that stinks, but at least we will get the money eventually. However, I *will* enjoy this time to write :)

PJ Hoover said...

Ask me in August when I have 9-3 for 2 weeks.
I plan to write the entire time. No blogging, no website updates. Just write, write, write!

Lauren said...

@PJ- No blogging? Boo...will miss you. I hope you get tons of good work done :)

Charles Gramlich said...

Good luck. I can attest that it's very nice to really be able to focus a chunk of time on writing.

Anonymous said...

I don't know what I'd do with two weeks of freedom. It's hard to do with young kids at home. Maybe hand our at the public pool every day for two weeks. I could get used to that :)

Have fun on your time off. I'm sure you'll do some brilliant writing.

Lauren said...

@charles- I am looking forward to it! Funny how things work out :)

@writer- I hope so! My goal is to write 10k words, which might be a bit lofty seeing as how I have family coming into town for a three day weekend (yeah, that timing ended up being nice...free vaca day :) )

Jennifer Shirk said...

Two weeks of freedom? WOW. Sounds heavenly...

Leigh Russell said...

An at-home vacation is not a vacation to a writer, but it is a great opportunity. I'm on a nine week vacation from school right now and life has been more hectic than ever. My first book launched a month ago and I've been running around on a busy national tour to promote it. So far so good my book's selling really well, but as for vacation... I've also been invited to blog regularly for two media outlets which is fantastic, but I should be working on my next book which is due out in 2010...

If you're online on Thursday please visit my new blog on www.thecurzongroup.com where I'm posting regularly every Thursday. I'd love to have some American visitors there.

C said...

Hey :) at least you may have a bit of fun, despite your & your company's bad luck. If I had a couple of weeks of pure freedom.. I'd make things :) lots of things :) things i don't have time to all the rest of the time.
also I'd try to cross a whole bunch of things of my list :)
(the list in my blog.. in case you didnt look, haha, it would make no sense)

Lauren said...

@jennifer- yes, with the first week down it has been very nice to get some stuff done that I hadn't had time to do.

@leigh- too true. although, the goal I gave myself in my post to spend 4 hours a day didn't quite pan out as I had lots of other things that needed to get done. I think I got a total of 10 hours in, which is better than none. But I've got another whole week out there AND my massive to-do around the condo list is now much more manageable.

@charlie- I have a list too (it's 105 things). I think it's great that you are making a list for yourself, too! Although, "freedom" is a relative term. Still had LOTS to do that wasn't optional :-/

Lauren said...

@charlie- I hope you subscribed to the comments and can see this. I tried to comment on your blog, but it wouldn't let me. It says there is some form of html parsing error (I tried in firefox, which is what I usually use, and it didn't do anything then I tried in IE and that is where it said the error). I just wanted to let you know!

Related Posts with Thumbnails