One of the things they put in the “So, You Want To Be A Writer?” brochure is that being a writer is every bit a job.

This is only a half-truth.

The full truth is that being a writer is every bit every single job that has to be done. Like any work-from-home start-up, being a writer requires you to wear all the hats. You’re the writer, the marketing department, the IT guy, and the accountant–and any other role which needs filling.

And even when we’re “writing,” there’s a lot more going on than composition. There’s writing, revision, research, more revision, re-writing, and that’s not even counting the outlining if you’re one of those folks.

Anyone who’s been at this for a while already knows this, but I run into the odd friend who observes in breathless wonder: “Wow. Like, writing is the thing you do the least of!”

It’s true.

In the average day I lay down between 1,000 and 2,000 words. That takes me about 90 minutes. The rest of my time is spent on research, revision, answering email messages, doing the social networking thing, work-related reading, and dealing with this web site.

It’s that last one that’s sucked up most of my time lately. I’ve spent most of the last few days building a new WordPress theme from scratch. That’s not exactly hard, but it’s time-consuming and fiddly.

Yeah, “fiddly” is the perfect description for working with HTML, CSS, and PHP. You get some little thing looking mostly how you want it, like it’s 80 percent of the way there, then the last 20 percent takes two hours and a lot of swearing.

All of this is to say my goals took a back seat as of Thursday. I managed to nail my reading goal, but that’s about it. On the plus side, I’m pretty sure I’ll have this site looking exactly how I want it sooner rather than later.

So that’s where I’m at. What about you?

Oh, and my head wouldn’t be a suitable rack for the marketing hat if I didn’t remind you that Episode 20 of my serial is going up tomorrow. It’s entirely possible you’ll love it.