Writing and proofreading and indexing, oh my!

The River Torne is a river the poet used to fish when ‘e worra lad (when he was a young man). In those days, the lads used to wait until the river had been dredged, usually around September time, and the reeds and weeds removed from the edges. Apparently, that was the best time to fish.

We went to look at the River Torne a couple of weeks ago to see if it was a viable venue for him now that we’re so close to it. But he says it’s been allowed to get overgrown and silted up at the edges, and it’s not as wide as it used to be. All of those reeds on the far side would have been cleared and they would sit on that grassy bank.

As you can see, the reeds have spread quite far into the water, and unless they clear it, he won’t be fishing here.

This river is one of three drains that run alongside each other, it’s the one in the middle. It starts in Maltby in Rotherham, and it drains into the River Trent at Keadby in Lincolnshire.

It might not be any good for fishing, but I think it might be a good dog-walking place.

The Life of Richard Cadbury

We’ve been waiting for the foreword for The Life of Richard Cadbury, which is due to be published on 30 November, and I received an email yesterday morning to say it would be with us by the end of this week.

This is mostly good news as it means the book will be ready to go by mid-October, which was when everything needed to be finalised.

The slightly bad news is that it now means I have to do the index. And that will make me even busier next week, I believe. Something else may have to give while I do that.

I passed the news on to my handler at the publisher, and while I was at it I sent them the new address too.

While I was doing admin like this, I also scheduled the two daily October posts for the Seriously Serious Scribes on Facebook.

Catch the Rainbow

I had to do some research for this yesterday.

I wanted to check the real names of the actual victims of the Birmingham pub bombings (RIP) as well as the names of the (now) alleged perpetrators. I also wanted to check who was the Home Secretary at the time (Roy Jenkins, MP) and who was the Archbishop of Birmingham (George Dwyer).

All of these names went onto my character sheet in the Scrivener file and coloured blue. I didn’t want to inadvertently use the same name for someone when there was a real person in a similar position. I’d already used the same first name for my perp as one of the actual (now) alleged perps.

I managed some writing, but it’s mostly in narrative form and needs to be re-written in dramatic form.

However, I still added 845 words against a target of 782. According to my 10-project planner, this was just 1% shy of my total target for September. It gives me an initial daily target for October of 776 words.

I didn’t get around to any work for Diary of a Pussycat.

Ghostwriting

So the plan was to re-read what I’d written the day before and then just carry on writing. I couldn’t afford to spend all of the rest of the day on this and end up with only 400 words. So I turned off the internet and tried to focus on actually writing my first scene at least.

There were no painters, no gardeners, no one picking up hire cars, and no neighbours talking loudly with everyone outside our door. At least that was promising.

When I passed the 1,000-word mark (in total, not for the day so far, sadly), I broke for dinner. Then I decided to crack on with the proofreading to give myself a bit of a break and maybe come back to it later.

Proofreading

I managed a few hours of proofreading, but by the time I’d come to a suitable place, I didn’t have time to go back to the ghostwriting. So I totted up my numbers and called it a day.

Jobs to do today

I’ve changed the target word-counts for October for Catch the Rainbow (down) and Diary of a Pussycat (up). The ghostwriting target will stay the same. For now.