What am I doing?!

Most days I tend to cruise along. You know, I start the day with the traditional "Good morning!" greeting with my children, we do breakfast, get ready for the day and then make our way through our mostly "regular" day before my husband and I tuck them into bed at night. Wash, rinse, repeat. Sure, we sometimes get off course with the pesky cold (sometimes WAY off course when the cold lasts longer than a week) or enjoy a thrill or two when visitors are in town or we cram extra fun into a weekend. But usually we just stick to the schedule. Kids do well with schedules. Moms do well with schedules. Dads like it when they can follow the schedule. Remember to take this all with a grain of salt and know that I'm really just generalizing here!

But then a day like today comes along and *SLAM*. I'm on the ground clutching my head and looking up at Mt. Rainier wondering how I plowed head-first into it (something so big surely couldn't sneak up on a person). No, I didn't really ram into a mountain, rather I confronted about a dozen very real realities that are a part of my proverbial mountain - publishing my book. Dozens of hand-scrawled notes are strewn about my computer space (which I just cleaned last week - really!), I have at least 7 tabs open in my Explorer window going at any given time, and I'm following-up on emails and tasks for six different aspects of the business (distribution, website, reviews, author visits, marketing and . . . give me a minute, oh, yes, this blog!). Yet, while I toil away (breaking for an hour or two at a time to tend to my motherly duties) I don't feel as if I'm getting anywhere. It is like I'm running on the treadmill without the thrill of endorphins or a satisfying sweat. I'm left wondering, "What am I doing?!!"

Thanks to that husband of mine I'm stepping back and looking at each thing one at a time. He even took the paper and pen out of my hand and wrote the list for me (and checked-off some items I'd already managed to accomplish to show me that I AM making progress) so that it would seem more do-able. And so now, before I turn-in for the night (and before I do turn in-to a pumpkin), I can say with a sigh of relief that yes, I think we have some shipping issues on the way to being under control, we are a step closer to having a distributor, I think the formatting is better for the commerce section of the website, it is okay to wait until tomorrow to put together the review packets, author visit stuff can wait until we get the other stuff under control, marketing is another task for another day, and this blog entry is nearly finished.

There. I think I can breathe now. I'm stepping back from that mountain - one careful step at a time. If I can distance myself from it a bit more I'll be able to enjoy its majesty and beauty and then do some training before I attempt to summit it again.