I am a freelance writer for business clients. Most of my work is for the tourism industry but I do a bit of everything. My clients are happy and loyal. I haven't self-advertised in over a decade because my clients do that for me. Every new client I've gotten in the last 10 years has been a referral.
I asked my clients to stop sharing my name for the time-being because I am trying to work less in order to focus on my, hopefully, new career in fiction. One of my clients was thrilled with this news. Knowing that I'm no longer accepting new clients meant that she could send me a mountain of work. That's what this week looked like. One mountain of writing things. So while last week I predicted that I would write 10,000 words this week I wasn't wrong, but those 10,000 words had nothing to do with my next novel.
My downtime was not spent writing. It was spent communicating with publishers and literary agents and obsessively checking my email. Rather than feeling the heaviness of rejections, I have felt the elation that comes from multiple requests for new partial manuscripts, followed by multiple requests for new manuscripts.
As for my GISH Personal Challenge, I just didn't have the bandwidth for novel writing this week. I don't have any new words but I do have a new plan and, in my opinion, an awesome outline. I can't wait to share it, I just have to write it first.