Investing in my business- as a Medical Writer?

Today I am on day two of my medical writing course.  The course is going to be helpful both  for gaining some experience writing and certainly on the business end- which I feel is the biggest risk of the whole affair.  I am waffling between feelings of gung-ho "Small Business Built America!" and what-have-I-gotten-myself-into-ness, with a very acute sense that I need to learn about odds ratios and the statistics of risk ASAP.  The course is very oriented towards "How to:" run the business, write the documents, find the clients, keep the clients etc etc. It is not so much of the wishy-washy "is this for me?" day dream I am constantly having.  And of course, it is just the tiniest fraction of what I am spending my time on for the next couple weeks.

Just to make the note for myself, I am currently hoping to work 20 hrs a week for my favorite client, as I am trying to convince them to offer me a full time job in the form of a promotion.  I have suddenly received all manner of work that was delayed from my other client, which is awkward timing at best.  I'd hoped to be done with every last iota of that contract by Friday, but I'll be lucky if we aren't still doing this in October.  And while my internship has formally moved into wrap up stage, we decided to write a pre-proposal for a commercialization grant that I am trying to be involved in.  I've never written a grant before, but it appears to be all-consuming, especially when you are working with a nascent idea like ours.  But I wanted to stick around to see what that process is like, since I've never been involved in a grant submission before.

I decided to take the course regardless because I wanted to do something concrete for my career, and I thought enough of the topics would be valuable to me even if I chose to keep freelancing in curriculum development. All of the above is keeping me quite busy, but in 6 months will any of it propel me forward to the next stage of my career?  No. I need to invest in myself and my future a bit, and when you replace "me" with "this business," it seems a lot more obvious where the investment is needed.

In the continued interest of investing in this business, I bought a second monitor.  I have been doing all this work from the laptop I bought after my old mac fizzled out after my defense.  It's a nice laptop, but I notice I work from AT LEAST 3 windows (not counting needing to monitor 2 email accounts and leaving Pandora running), which is cludgy on one small window.  The new monitor is splendid for that, and it makes me feel like I could get a system in order for being a professional in this so called office of mine. My next investment for the business will be figuring out about finances and taxes and other mysteries of being your own bookkeeper.