I’ve been busy, honest!

I’ve not been completely idle since 17 October (that’s more than two whole weeks ago!). But I have been tied up with stuff I’d sooner not be tied up with. Actually, I’d rather not be tied up at all, but you get the drift.

As a result of losing two whole weeks of work, along with another two weeks of plain old crap, I came back to my desk feeling a bit overwhelmed and not knowing where to start.

I had a few jobs in – including an editing job from Hong Kong and another editing job from Australia – but I also had my own book to write as well as NaNoWriMo to prepare for, and a pocket novel to continue with.

The first thing to go was NaNoWriMo. I’d already negotiated extra time for the biography, but I couldn’t justify also working on a novel every day of the month. And the novel will still be there in December.

I also shelved the pocket novel for now. Again, that will still be there once I’ve met my new deadline.

Then I cleared both of the editing jobs, just to ensure a little cashflow at least while I’m working on the book.

I found three publishers who might consider republishing Night Crawler and prepared submissions for those. Unfortunately, two have come back negative, but I’m still waiting to hear from the other one.

I did a quick read-through of a short story I wrote a while ago, Pippa & Davey Forever, and I fired that off to one of my favourite publications. I’m delighted to say that it was accepted and will be in the 25 January edition of My Weekly.

Another job I’ve been dipping into has been my NetGalley review work. I’ve read one book already that still awaits the review, and I started another that I’m struggling to put down.

And then I spent several days looking at, discarding and selecting various productivity methods.

In the end, I plumped for Trello, as I already use it for other stuff. But I looked at a couple of other boards to see if there were templates I could use or adapt or copy for my own board.

My master board now looks like this:

And if I open up the Richard Cadbury board, it looks like this@

Yes, there’s still a lot of work to do there. But I *have* already written almost 16,000 words. (Only 54,000 to go …)

Trello has improved a lot since I first started to use it, with some new features that I’ll personally find quite useful, such as the calendar. I can attach due dates to each of the T-cards, and I can add notes to the cards as well as links and files.

I still have to tidy up some of the other boards, such as MY BOOKS and MY SHORT MATERIAL. But at least I have a focus now, and a calendar of sorts.

The three templates I still have to explore are: PRODUCTIVITY, Publishing Process (I think this one is from The Telegraph), and Writing a Book. I may decide not to keep one or all of them. But not now. Right now I’m simply too busy.

I’m turning my day on its head so that I’m writing the blog at the end of it and scheduling it for *tomorrow*. My mornings are back to being admin and client work. My afternoons are my work and writing work.

I’ve given myself just over two weeks to finish the first draft of this book. Then I have just under two weeks to finalise it and polish it.

I still have to get some permissions for material before I can use it. And I have books that were loaned to me to get back to their rightful owner. I think the photographs, which the poet is managing, are all pretty much done.

Yesterday morning I had another pass on one of the editing jobs plus a load of admin and some quick warm-up jobs. Yesterday afternoon, I finished reading one of the books for the biography and moved the T-card to the “done” section.

Today the plan is more admin work this morning – although I think there’s another editing job due in from Hong Kong and I know he wants it back quite quickly. Then this afternoon I’ll be writing up notes from yesterday’s reading.

If I get chance, I may write up the first of those two NetGalley reviews.

2 thoughts on “I’ve been busy, honest!

  1. Welcome back. it’s a good job you are so organised. I’ve not heard of Trello. Have you given up on Scrivener or is that just for your own wriitng? Good luck with it all. x

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