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Monday! Hurray! I am so in love with Mondays. No, seriously! On Monday mornings, my dear husband goes to work, my sweet son goes off to preschool, and I’m left with a couple of hours to myself to work. It’s heaven – the best way to start the week. By the time I have to go retrieve the toddler, I usually feel like I have at least a vague idea of how much needs to be accomplished during the rest of the week.

Monday morning is also my time to do The Dreaded Chore. I’m not much of a procrastinator, but every week, there’s something. It varies, but The Dreaded Chore is usually something that got put off from, say, the previous Thursday. A phone call I didn’t want to make. An email that I was “too busy” to return. A bit of tedious research that I’d been successfully avoiding. Monday morning, I just hold my nose and tackle whatever it is I most don’t want to do. And man, is that a great way to start the week – with the whew-that’s-done relief of having The Dreaded Chore behind me.

This week, it’s double-checking the timelines from my copy edits. I’ve heard friends of mine – already published authors – complaining about doing their copy edits. I never really understood. I mean, copy editing is just to correct that last, nit-picky stuff, right? Except that’s the problem. For most writers I know – and I can now include myself in this group – copy editing makes us want to throw up our hands and declare it too hard. Missing weeks, inaccurate sunrise times . . . this stuff can make a person crazy! Which is not to say that I am in any way frustrated with my copy editor. On the contrary – I’m deeply grateful that there’s someone out there dedicated and detailed enough to catch those sorts of mistakes before some eagle-eyed reader goes: “Hey! It couldn’t have happened that way! What sort of hack is this woman?”

The problem is fixing all of those mistakes. It’s a Dreaded Chore. And since it’s Monday morning, it’s time for me to quit procrastinating and finish correcting my slip-ups. Happy Dreaded Chore Day, everyone!

Tags: chores, copy editing, Monday, writing