Jean-Francois Millet, Man With a Hoe, ca. 1860

I appear to have experienced a new “going out and coming in” (to put it in biblical terms) in my life. I have gone out of the age of leisure, and come into the age of workoholism.

For the time being, anyway.

“Workoholic” is one of those terms, like “plutocrat” and “spelunker” that I never expected to apply to myself. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you that one of Walker’s essential characteristics is languor. When the call goes out for hardy souls to lend a hand and see the thing through, I can usually be found somewhere in the vicinity of the donut table.

But here I am, in my sixth decade, living a life essentially divided up between work and sleep, with a few brief intervals for eating.

When I go to work, I work. So that’s eight hours right there.

Then I come home, and after a crust of stale bread and a ration of rum, I do my blog post.

Then I pull out my translating work. Right now I’m nearly at the end, in purely spatial terms. I’m within a few pages of the end of the book. I can see it, as the pioneers saw the Rocky Mountains slowly rise before them on their trek west.

But I’m in the endnotes, and endnotes are made of that stuff in neutron stars that weighs a billion pounds per half teaspoon. It’s slow moving through the endnotes. The print is small, and they’re picky, with many opportunities for mistakes you have to fix.

When that challenge starts to get the better of me, I switch over to the Kindle file for my upcoming novel, Hailstone Mountain (which although delayed looks to be within a reasonable range of getting published at last).

These things I do five days a week. Saturday presents a wonderful opportunity to change and change about between the translating and novel projects alone, for most of the whole day.

Sunday, of course, is the day of rest. I made a covenant long ago that I would never write for money on a Sunday.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t write. I was recently sent a manuscript by an elderly Norwegian missionary I know, for whom I’d done some translation work before on a pro bono basis. He translated this book (it’s on the authority of Scripture) himself, but asked me to polish it up for him. As it happens it needs quite a bit of polishing.

So that’s my Sunday work.

I’ve started to worry about my health. Too much time in the chair. So tonight I put in twenty minutes on the Nordic Track, and plan to carry that on. Because having a stroke is God’s way of saying you’re working too hard.