I'm really pretty blessed to be able to work from home, and to work for this pretty awesome boss. He's so cool, I married him. Okay, well, he wasn't my boss when I married him; we started the company a few months after our wedding. But, the upshot is, I get to lock myself away in my attic office to "work" several times a week, and as long as I get done the things I need to get done for our business, however I spend the rest of my time is mine.

That's great on normal days, because I can generally fly through most of the stuff I have to get done on a daily basis and then spend my afternoon chatting with my muse. However, we're hitting an incredibly busy patch for me here. This isn't normally a busy time, in fact, it's usually just settling in for our long, unbusy winter. But, we're in this big transitory phase that is entailing a lot of extra work for me, and that pretty much sucks.

It sucks for lots of reasons, but the biggest one is because I haven't even looked at my book in over a week. Sigh.

I was thinking about this a lot last night, since my girls both fell asleep pretty much of their own volition, and I had a small chunk of evening to myself. I ended up cleaning the living room with the TV playing The Biggest Loser in the background. I was intimidated by the thought of trying to find my place and pick up where I'd left off.

I think I'm afraid that my muse may have gotten bored and taken off in search of a more fertile work place.

Then, this morning, I read some of Laurell K. Hamilton's tweets regarding this very issue. She, like me, has a child and can't do "the distracted artist" thing anymore. I never really did get to do that, come to think of it. I've never taken my writing seriously enough to even consider it art, never mind think that I could do anything with it.

Now that I am taking all of this more seriously, I really wish I could take a weekend or two to get the kids out of the house and have a chance to play the distracted artist, forgetting to eat, staying up till 3am because the muse is clicking away on my keyboard, only remembering to feed the dog when he deposits his food dish in my lap at the computer.

And, you know, maybe one of these days, I will get to do that. And I'll probably hate it, anyway, because that's my personality for you; always wanting what I can't have. But, it's not happening right now. The Monster is too little to really go anywhere overnight without Mommy. And Mr. O's business needs me pretty desperately right now, so even on the rare occasion that he takes them somewhere without me (He brought them to his parents' house on Sunday, in fact), I end up doing work for his business (While they were at his parents', I got a direct mail piece stuffed, sealed, and addressed. There were a thousand pieces. It took allllll day.), or cleaning my sadly neglected home.

I need a personal assistant (which was the upshot of Ms. Hamilton's tweets, what would she do without her PA?), but the closest thing I've got to a PA lives all the way in Wisconsin. Of course, she is pretty amazing, with the amount of help she's able to give me from all the way in Wisconsin ;)

Thanks, Sherry :)