Week off work!

It seems like ages since my last holiday -- the four-day Easter weekend. But I have the whole of next week off! We're spending Sun-Thurs in the Lake District (and the weather looks like being good), then Friday will be a day to work on my new website...

As usual, things have been busy. Work's been more stressful than usual, especially with my line manager being away quite a bit recently. I'm trying to cut down on how much I'm doing outside of work and have:

• Put my short story correspondence course on hold till September
• Stepped down as property committee secretary at church (I just have to write up the minutes from last Thursday's meeting, then I'm done...)

I feel guilty about both -- I was really enjoying the course and wanted to get further on with it before Goldsmiths, and although I got rather put on the spot and talked into doing the property committee job, I feel I shouldn't say "no" to Church things. I'm justfying it on the grounds I've taken on a much bigger role in the children's work recently.

My new personal website/blog template is going well: it's taking a long time to do quite small things, and it's a steep learning curve, but I'm definitely finding out a lot. And the design is coming together very nicely, thanks to the Boyfriend's help. I'm hugely excited about this site, and want to get it off to a really good start.

I've also ordered some business cards to advertise my writing and website creation services; those should be arriving soon ...

The Office Diet now has 242 subscribers (over double the number from May 17th's update). I've earned over £600 so far from the staff blogging too ... so much that Paypal have asked me to verify my account information. I'm going to buy myself an HP Mini-Note with some of the earnings ...

At the moment, it still feels like there's a long way to go before I get to where I want to be with the freelancing and with my other writing. But I'm convinced I'm moving in the right direction!