Diary of a non-fiction book: week 1 – day 3

By Wednesday I started to get into the swing of things and was beginning to feel like a proper writer again, writing for a living and all that.

I was later to my desk as I was later getting up, and so the chores weren’t finished until closer to 10:30am. I very quickly entered some competitions that were closing soon, and then I opened up my Scrivener binder again.

The day before I’d added all of my research index-cards – one per chapter and for subheadings within the chapters, plus a general one. Yesterday I colour-coded them red for research (chapters are colour-coded green) and “stuck pins” in them, pinning them to the board.

As only other users of Scrivener will know what I mean here, here’s an idea. I love this virtual cork noticeboard.

Can you see the “stack” of cards behind those top two index cards? That means there are sub-sections.

Then I wrote two first drafts – one for the introduction and one for “about the author”. This meant I could change the watermarks on both of the chapter index cards from “to do” to “first draft”.

Those teal cards are colour-coded “bumf”.

The rest of my non-fiction book work was actual, real research, and I settled down to read the first of the two books I bought for Kindle the day before.

I still did some admin, while I was at my desk, although some may call it faffing. The bright-eyed and bushy-tailed will notice that the sidebar has been updated with all of the current project word-count meters.  I discovered that the Diary of a Non-fiction Book will actually be book 4 in the series and not book 3. And I was able to update my word-count tracker spreadsheet with both the new projects and various numbers of words.

I changed the toner in the printer and printed off the new client edit the day before, so I could start that in the afternoon. But that was about all I managed on that. So Wednesday afternoon was spent editing.

Tomorrow’s jobs are much the same as today’s and yesterday’s, so I shan’t bore everyone by repeating them again. But I still have the 3,500-word short story to edit as well.

2 thoughts on “Diary of a non-fiction book: week 1 – day 3

  1. Bight eyed and bushy tailed? Nah! But I do love to watch an organised person at work. 😀

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