The freelance juggle. I'm sure we're all familiar. I've been feeling it particularly strongly this week.

I got asked to jump in at short notice to direct a project, which is an exciting challenge. I don't have a lot of time to prepare but pressure makes diamonds. The challenge is to make sure I don't drop any other balls. I thought I would have a few leisurely weeks of tidying up bits and pieces for other projects, and then suddenly that time went away.

So, this week, I finished the working drafts of my libretti and formatted the sheet music. Then I wrote the first draft of a script for my summer school workshop and sent it to the team. I started drafting the text for my new "jukebox opera" and, of course, started listening to the score for the new project on a loop.

Sometimes I do find it stressful having so many balls in the air (yes, I'm sticking with the metaphor). It can take up a lot of brain space keeping track of them all. I have been known to write to do lists with individual tasks for each email I need to send. However, what a joy to be juggling so many creative things. I would take the challenge of a dozen creative juggles over one pile of admin any day of the week.


Image credit to Alexey Turenkov on Unsplash