At the end of the month I’ll go off to visit a friend for a week. It’s the same semi-vacation I’ve taken several times already and I love it. My friend lives in the “almost woods,” an area with few other houses, lots of trees, and long roads made for long walks. His house is quiet, peaceful and blessed with the fastest broadband connection I’ve ever seen.

Two or three hours of work there is worth four or five hours here. I can’t point to any one thing that makes me so much more productive there, but the truth lies somewhere between it being a change of scenery and being devoid of distractions.

When I go for these visits, we don’t make any specific plans on how to spend the time. Usually we end up doing some combination of playing video games, watching movies and going out to a few restaurants–with a healthy dose of doing absolutely nothing thrown in for good measure. This time isn’t much different, although we have made plans to visit this tavern that sells a crazy array of microbrews. It’s within walking distance of his house, so that should be a fun night.

The point of all this is that whenever I go there I get a taste of something I’d love to have a heaping plate of: live on the edge of civilization, out in the quiet, working free of all distractions until I decide I want to be distracted.

It’d sound like a myth if I didn’t visit twice a year.

Anyway, about that working thing…

Freelancing

I’m rolling like a hunchback doing somersaults on this goal. I sent three articles to a site for the folks there to consider. If they like them, the articles go up for their clients to review and purchase. If they don’t like them, I hope I get feedback I can use in my next attempts.

I’ve also been doing more research on how to sell articles to magazines. I’ve just about wrapped up the “how to” part of that, so I should be able to focus on the issue of “where.” I’ll be picking up a copy of the Deluxe Edition of the Writer’s Market next month, which will help.

I’m also researching for several articles I’d like to write, taking notes and absorbing details.

Put all that together and I figure I’m rocking the house.

This Site

Still posting as often as I want, although the little site tweaks I planned on doing just aren’t going to happen now. That’s my fault, mainly for thinking I could put a schedule on sysadmin/web development stuff. I hate fiddling with stuff like that and can only do it when the mood is perfect.

Yeah, I should shoulder past my aversion to playing with PHP and CSS. I should do a lot of things, but I ain’t gonna. The site looks good enough, it’s laid out well enough and I don’t think the changes I have planned are going to be worth the rise in blood pressure I get every time I start staring at config panels and source code.

The Week Ahead

More of the same is on it’s way. More writing, more research, more reading and more waiting. I’ve got a little woodland paradise to look forward to and the more I work, the more time flies.