In celebration of Friday, I offer a little English language horror — I mean humor.

From Cake Wrecks: You Too Can Prevent Random Quotation Marking

From The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks: “girl scouts”

From Larsen Idealog: Yikes! “Exhibiting Paintings” Exhibits Typos

From Typo Hunt Across America: Ladie’s Night

From Flickr’s Typo Pool: State Motol

There’s a difference between working as a writer and running a writing business. As Avenue Z Writing Solutions grows, I’m discovering I need to dedicate more and more time to simply keeping the business going.

I now spend a couple of hours a day (at least) just … umm… doing business things: answering emails, setting appointments, maintaining my blog, etc. And that doesn’t include the time I should be spending on marketing and organization.

This may sound crazy, but I’m hiring an assistant, or at least I’m taking the steps to hire one. I placed an ad on craigslist this morning, and I just received my first reply.

I’m asking for help for 4 hours a week. This will give me a dedicated person to help with my blog and website, follow through with marketing, assist with research and bug me about doing my billing and accounting.

One of the main benefits will be the peace of mind I’ll get by being able to get some of my tasks out of my head. When I’m relaxing in the tub or running in the evening or heading off to bed, I’m ALWAYS feeling guilty about things left undone. I have great marketing ideas I want to put in motion. I need to really clean up this blog. I have to update the samples and testimonials on my website. These little things drive me crazy and make it almost impossible for me to truly relax.

Side note — Productivity Guru David Allen’s philosophy is that these little nagging thoughts are what stop you from being productive. His book rocks!

Thus, I’m hiring someone. I’m justifying it because I’m no longer hitting the coffee shop every day, and, believe it or not, I was spending almost as much per month at the coffee shop as I will be paying an assistant. Yeah. I had a problem.

Cross your fingers!

I’ve been rockin’ busy this morning with calls, emails and plans. I have another telecon in 20 minutes, and I need several minutes to prepare. I’m hectic and productive.

At about 11 a.m. I took out a healthful chicken breast to cook for lunch. Seven minutes ago I realized I was starving and didn’t have time to wait, so I frantically stuffed down some broken, stale tortilla chips, dipping them into the mostly empty dregs of three bottles of salsas and spreads.

You’d think I’d be able to manage lunch better since I work at home.You’d think I’d remember that yesterday someone thought I looked thin.

You’d be wrong.

It’s noon and I just updated my overall to-do list (not all due today): 14 major categories/clients/things to finish.

My writing group starts in 75 minutes, and I have decided not to go, justifying that I have too much to do.

But that’s not the real reason. The true feet-dragging motivation is because I know I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in that class.

Am I really ready to write fiction again? Is it time to start a book based on this blog? Do I want to spend time critiquing other writers’ works?

I keep coming up with the same answer: No. I’m not ready. I’m not focused on piling on other writing responsibilities right now. My business keeps me busy, and I don’t know what I’d do with new stories or manuscripts I might produce for the class. I haven’t written one new thing since I started working with them. I keep resurrecting short stories I never submitted for publication. They’ve all been critiqued before, and they’re pretty solid. I just don’t want to go to the group empty handed, so I print out the stuff from 2006 and earlier, the last time I wrote creative stuff.

I could use a life coach right now to give me guidance about what I really want to be when my writing business grows up. Am I a fiction writer at heart? A speaker and writer of nonfiction business books? A writer of essays and columns? Or do I really want to completely jump off the writing ship in a couple of years and travel around the world helping out in disaster-striken areas (don’t laugh… this crosses my mind a lot)?

For now, I’m going to work through my to-do list and skip the writing group. Today at least, I’m a business woman with clients to please and marketing to plan. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll see if a pen and paper and a cup of coffee might lead me to write something besides a to-do list for Avenue Z.

Last night I took my MP3 player for a run. For at least 5 of the 5.28 miles, my damn earphones were slipping out of my ears. I need the kind that are made for runners, not the cheap earbuds that come with every MP3 player.

How much faster would I run if I wasn’t fiddling with my earphones and cussing?

And, in the bigger picture, what little things can I do or buy to cut down on cussing at work and to make me more productive?

Sometimes I think I miss the big picture about how to save time. I don’t remember that I wanted to make a template for client drafts until I have to do another client draft and I cuss because there’s no template. But by then I don’t have enough time to first create a template, so I just dive in and create the whole thing from scratch for the umpteenth time.

Other things I don’t remember to do in advance:

• Get a headset for my office phone so I don’t get a crick in my neck when I type notes.
• Rearrange my computer wires so I don’t get static on the stereo headphones or the landline.
• Put complete contact info into my Outlook address book so I don’t have to search old emails for phone numbers or go to the websites to look for client email addresses.
• Label notes in my spiral notebooks so I can find projects by client in a flash.
• Bookmark important websites so I don’t have to do a Google search each time.
• Keep style sheets for all my clients so I don’t have to look up whether they use a comma before “and” in a series or how they prefer to talk about their products.
• Create a new box for 2008 receipts — I’m still stuffing them in with the 2007 box.