To most of us, it's a chance to catch up. Get the laundry done, get the groceries, do all the chores we don't have time to do during the week.
My situation is a bit different than the normal Worker Bee. I work from home, so I can slip out during the weekday to get groceries, pick up the laundry, mail a letter. I can get the laundry done while I'm on a conference call and I can have the repair people over to fix something without much interruption in my life.
But the weekend is still catch-up for me and it's catch-up on the Writing Stuff. I'm on the day job from 5 a.m. to about 5 p.m. most days. I'm not chained to my desk the entire time but I am on duty, as it were, and try to answer all email and phone calls during that time. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm on call at night, too. I check my email until about 9 p.m. most days.
I try to have a firm cut-off time because once I'm off the Day Job, I can do the Writing Job. I don't like to post on Facebook, Twitter, etc. during my Day Job because, well, I'm on the job, you know? "Hmm. She's posting during office hours. I wonder why?" We don't have set hours, we don't have lunch hour, we don't have breaks. I'm always on the clock when the Day Job computer is turned on. Yes, I can walk away from the computer to run those errands, but I carry my phone with me and I'm available, if needed.
Let me hasten to say my boss does not insist on this. No one is looking over my shoulder. But it's still the principle of the thing, I guess. I like my Day Job (99% of the time. The other 1% is not so fun), and I plan to continue as long as my writing doesn't pay the bills. The minute my writing kicks in and earns me what my Day Job does, well, that's the day I can reconsider my priorities. But for now, I have to use Day Time for Day Job.
Weekends, though, are for the Writing Life. I only get 2 or 3 hours a night to work on writing, so the weekend is when I try to do some promoting, some research, some catching up on correspondence. Promotion is essential for an author like me, someone with small publishers who have little distribution (i.e., you don't see my books in a bookstore so there's no impulse purchasing). I have to target my audience, and I hope my audience will spread the word, so that, little by little, I build my own distribution.
That's where you folks come in. You're my network of people who will, I hope, spread the word about my books. ALL of them are still in print, and all of them are still available. There are new people all the time looking for books. If you've read one of my books, please share a review on Good Reads or Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The more reviews, the easier for my books to be found.
Anyway: here we are. It's the Weekend. A time of infinite possibilities, as far as I'm concerned. I have my list of Things To Get Done (post an excerpt here; upload some content there; set up a giveaway on Good Reads for then -- all repeating tasks). If I can get throught that To Do list, then maybe -- JUST MAYBE -- I can finish that book I've been working on since January 1. I have one more book I want to write before June 1, so... fingers, don't fail me now!
