An Achievement

Today, for the first time, I have 10 stories out at various markets. It's a strange feeling. I'm really, seriously pursuing my dream. I've managed - despite 50+ hour work weeks - to write a story a week for several weeks straight. I'm making progress (albeit slow) on two of five novel projects. All I need now is to actually sell something ;)

On the work front, life is hectic. A friend's analogy of a juggler with a limit of five balls trying to handle seven balls plus two knives and a running chainsaw comes to mind. Take this last week (PLEASE! Take it!)

I implemented a major upgrade to our company's work tracking tool. Naturally, it had problems. Most were the kind of problems that come when you try to migrate 10GB of data on a server that has less than 1GB free. Lots of data entry for me...

Then there were the unforseen hiccups - I used my login to the tool to test that the upgrade worked. I discovered later that mine was one of the handful of records that had migrated correctly. Lots of data massage.

Eventually got that all sorted out, and got to try to fix some other issues that had been put on hold due to lack of time, including detailed time estimates for new work for a client.

Some of next week's fun things include:

• Long email to the boss, with numbers, about how much just one license of the testing software I've been trialing will save the company. Will need to include ways it can integrate with the internal tool he wants to develop, but be in production much faster than said internal tool.
• Testing software on the client's staging server, to make sure everything is working correctly.
• Testing other software, and trying to keep ahead of the developers working on said software.

This job is a lot of things, but it's certainly never boring! And boy, have I ever learned a lot since I started there.

Kate