I have a few vacation days left this year at work, and so I'm taking today through Friday off. These days were originally scheduled for sometime in November, but things got shuffled around to accomodate projects and coworkers, so I wound up off today. This is not inherently a bad thing, since a) I've been pretty burned out lately and b) November's gonna be hellacious busy as well -- I could use a break before heading in.
I have also found that when things are just too damn busy, time off doesn't do me much good, especially when I'm trying to get work done on the book. When I get a day off in the midst of a sea of hella busy, I mostly just sit there and twitch, thinking about all the other stuff I should be doing instead, and end up bolluxing the whole deal by surfing the internets instead, in a perfect storm of stress-induced work avoidance. This happened two weekends ago, in fact. I feel even more guilty and self-loathing afterwards, and it's a nasty little cycle, compounded by the fact that I have no other free time to try and make up the loss. So. Yeah. Better to wait until a lull, then go in loaded for bear.
That's today. I stayed up late last night and did some impending computer work (designing a faux-art-nouveau cigar box, if you want to know -- french curves are so not my friends) and thumbnailed two pages, thus leaving myself a clear to-do list for this morning. I"m hoping to have both pages pencilled by the time we leave for Art Night tonight, and thus to ink them at the coffee shop. Having two more pages ready for toning is a Very Good Thing. Tomorrow and Friday I hope to lay in word balloons, do final touchup (such as dropping in the cigar box in Photoshop) and get the promised PDF out to beta readers a couple weeks early. Again, this is really necessary, because November's going to be a time-sink.
The general goal is to stay off the intertubes as much as possible, and get as much work done before Monday as I can. Wish me luck!
Posted by Janer