The Reality of Running a Bookish Small Business While Working a 9–5 (and Raising a Family) - Part 2: The Double Life; 9–5 Worker by Day, Business Owner by Night, mother 24/7.

You’re back — which either means you’re deeply invested in this little journey of mine, or you’re procrastinating something important. Either way, welcome to Part 2.

I have a full‑time day job, Monday to Friday, and I’m expected to be there for eight hours a day. It's fulfilling work; I work for a not-for-profit Indigenous health organisation as a digital experience officer. I basically make the internet less annoying. I’m the person who takes our websites (a whopping 7 of them) and digital systems and turns them into something humans can actually use without wanting to throw their laptops or phones across the room. I rewrite clunky content, tidy up messy pages, check what people click on (and what they avoid), and make everything clearer, faster, and easier. Think of me as the translator between real people and the online world — part digital fairy godmother, part website wrangler, part user‑experience detective. If something feels smooth, helpful, and not like a digital maze… that’s me doing my job.

Living in the city means adding a one‑hour commute each way, plus the daily chaos of childcare and school drop‑offs and pick‑ups. I have four beautiful girls, two dogs, a cat, and a husband — our house is full, loud, and always moving. We don’t live outside our means; in fact, we usually get by on the bare minimum, and our little “side hustles” are what help us scrape over the line each month.

Our mornings start at 5 or 6 am, depending on how many times we hit snooze. Mondays and Fridays, I work from home, which makes school runs a little easier. Wednesdays are daddy drop‑off days, and I’m on the bus at 6:45 am and back home around 5 or 6 pm. Tuesdays and Thursdays? Pure chaos. Early drop‑offs for all the kids — the youngest under one, the eldest ten — and we all roll back in the door around 6 pm if the universe is kind.

Then comes the nighttime routine: dinner, baths, homework, bedtime. And once the house finally settles, that’s when my second shift begins.

Because I work for someone else during the day, everything for Tales & Trinkets — and my writing, since I’m trying to get Book 2 of my epic fantasy series out — happens at night or on weekends (when I'm not taking kids to sports or trying to catch up on housework, or trying to spend time with my husband). After the kids are asleep, and usually after my husband has gone to bed, I’m at my computer. Drafting blogs like this one, creating newsletters, scheduling Instagram posts, updating the website, replying to emails, packing orders, and designing or making merch and doing everything I can to keep Tales & Trinkets alive and growing.

But the double life isn't just about time; it's about mental switching. One minute I'm in a meeting about updating the websites at work, the next I'm wiping peanut butter off a school uniform or attempting to get 4 kids out the door and into the car without forgetting anything, and then hours later I'm designing a bookmark or editing a chapter. My brain never fully clocks off; it just switches costumes.

Am I a writer? Am I a business owner? A mum? An employee? All of them? None of them? Some days I feel like I'm wearing every hat at once, and other days I feel like I'm failing them all equally.

The guilt of missing important moments, or of being so rushed when you do make them that you barely feel present. Being too tired to give 100% to any one thing, yet somehow pouring yourself into twelve different tasks anyway. And then there’s the guilt of dreaming bigger than the life you currently have — the tug‑of‑war between responsibility and ambition, and that quiet voice telling you that you should be content, even though all you want is to give your family more than you ever had.

Some nights it's easy, I am full of beans, ideas and excitement. Other nights, I'm running on nothing but stubbornness and caffeine. There are countless moments where I end up doom-scrolling Instagram or where I stare at my screen and wonder how long I can keep doing two full-time jobs, and be a good mum and wife. Then there are times when someone tags me in a post, or I get an email from an Indie author thanking me for promoting them, and I'm reminded why I am doing this. For all those other people out there that have a love for reading, for those that are small indie authors like myself and don't have or know the avenues that are available to them for advertising. To support those around me and, hopefully, build a village of like-minded authors, business owners, and readers.

It’s a double life — one that stretches me thin, one that leaves very little room for rest, but one that’s built on passion, stubbornness, and the hope that one day this little business will become the thing that supports us, instead of the thing I squeeze into the cracks of my day.

If you’re still here, and still keen to hear more of my late‑night rambles, I’ll see you in Part 3,

Kristie.