When you’re a writer who also has a full-time job and some time-consuming hobbies (not to mention catching up on your sleep), deciding what to do with your available hours becomes something of a dilemma. With another weekend looming, I’ll be facing it again. Winters aren’t so problematic, or at least last winter wasn’t. With the record cold in the Great White North, we didn’t get a single weekend where we felt like going cross-country skiing – something to do with the -20 to -30 temperatures and exposed flesh, even if it’s only part of the face.

But now with summer almost here, the urge, nay the need to get ourselves into the woods for a few hours each weekend and drain the stress toxins of the previous week becomes paramount. Add to that the necessary chores and the desire to simply goof off, the hours available for serious writerly stuff dwindle fast. I’m half-way through the second re-write of The Path of Duty, and falling behind schedule.   Last weekend, I only managed to complete half of the amount of revising I wanted to do, in large part because we decided that I desperately needed to go hiking on Sunday. And I will desperately need to go hiking again this coming Sunday. We’ve even selected the trail already. I’ll try to do a lot of the chores after work on Friday, so that I can spend most of Saturday on the manuscript, but it never quite works out that way. I’ve been spending at least a little bit of time every day lately reconnecting with another hobby, simply to change pace and keep my mind off work-related garbage, and that too has to factor into the decisional dilemma. We’ll see how this weekend turns out.

I’d really like to be ready to ship a printed proof to my proof-reader by the end of the month so I can meet my July publication date and at this point, I have three weekends left, days when I’ll be inside staring into a computer screen while Mrs Thomson is outside enjoying her garden. She keeps telling me I’m doing this because I enjoy writing fiction but sometimes I think that I’m merely expressing a repressed masochistic streak.

I hope you all enjoy your weekend doing something you like, wherever you are on planet Earth.