Wednesday 17 July 2019

It was so hot here yesterday I ended up stripping down to just a nightie and flip flops to sit and work in. That felt both refreshing and quite liberating. I’m not complaining. The last house was the coldest house in the world and cost us a fortune to heat. At least that’s one thing less to worry about here.

Yesterday started early for me because the poet has sold his car. He’s had a company car for a while, and we finally got around to selling the “spare” last week.  They came to collect it yesterday morning, but the closest time they could give me was between 8:30 and 9:30am.

He arrived at just after 9am and by 9:15 he and the car were gone.

My first hour of morning writing work was spent reading. I read a chapter of a book I’ll be reviewing for NetGalley. I read a chapter of a book I’m using for Richard Cadbury research. And I read a chapter of Writing the Killer Mystery (vol 3) for The Beast Within.

The next hour of morning writing work was spent writing blog posts. I wrote the first of the new writing diary posts, and I wrote up this week’s Goldthorpe Writers report.

I did some admin, which included paying my membership to the CWA. And I had a proper dinner break. I played a computer game and caught up on Facebook while I ate leftover pizza.

The afternoon was spent editing. It’s a well-written story this time and doesn’t need very much doing to it, so it’s a nice read.

The poet was away yesterday, so I had tea and watched a few YouTube videos. There was nothing I wanted to watch on live telly and all of our recordings we usually watch together. So instead, I watched interviews with James Patterson, Stephen King and Lee Child.

Thus inspired, I cracked open the notebook/switch and tried to open my Save the Cat template on Scrivener so I could do some seat-of-the-pants writing … but the template wouldn’t open on the notebook for some reason and I had to copy an earlier one, delete all the project-specific material and save that as a blank file instead.

That worked, but by now I didn’t want to do any pants writing. Instead, I started to transfer what little I have for The Fool to the new template.

I think I finished work at around midnight, and I was so tired I slept like a baby.

Today I’d like to shift a bit more of the editing job. I’m starting early-ish again, but I have about 6 minutes to finish this post and get to my desk – although my “desk” for the morning will be an armchair in the living room until it gets too warm to work in there.

Then I’ll move to the office, where we also have a comfy settee on which I can read and edit. When I’ve done a chunk of the editing job, I’ll do more work on The Fool.