A better day

I had a much better day yesterday.

10-project planner

Once I’d written yesterday’s blog, which was 1,293 words before I even started anything else, I moved on to my 10-project planner to add in all the projects I’m working on first. These are:

• ghostwriting gig (63,000 words in total, 40,000 for January)
• The Beast Within (80,000 words in total, 10,000 for January)
• proofreading job (252 pages in total for January)
• 12 short stories in 12 months (1 story in total for January)

As the month progresses, the proofreading job may be replaced by another. At which point I’ll add the new job in when it arrives.

I made sure that all of the formulae were correct so that all I have to do as I work through the month is plug in the latest day’s progress data. Unfortunately, days 1 – 4 (inc) were all zeroes … but day 5 onwards already looks better.

Ghostwriting gig

The next job I did was open up my Scrivener file and finish loading all the information I have for the new ghostwriting gig. This included the outlines for 15 beats, 28 chapters, an epilogue and a bonus short story.

I split each of the beats into 2 chapters and a 2-part epilogue, but as there are a few scenes in some of the chapters, those might get split into further chapters. All I want to do is keep a balance between the first half of the story and the second half.

In all, I added 3,687 words to the ghostwriting gig, which means I’ve almost caught up on Monday already.

The Beast Within

As the poet hadn’t made it home yet by the time I finished the ghostwriting segment of the day, I opened up the Marcie Craig binder in Scrivener and addressed The Beast Within.

First of all, I familiarised myself with the story so far, and then I went through adding in little bits here and there. I changed one chapter from first person to second person, and I tweaked the plot in places.

By the time the poet arrived home, I’d added a few more words to the book. I paused to have something to eat, and then we took the dog on his belated walk.

It was gone 3pm by the time I was back at my desk. And I was back at work straight away. I beavered away and added lots of notes. These don’t get added to the overall running total, but by the time I left the job, the book was standing at 7,351 words.

Proofreading

Last official job of the day, then, was proofreading. I retired to my reading chair where I decided to read until the end of the first chapter, and that took me to 29 pages.

However, with the illustrations pages added to the mix, the total number of pages for this project went from 252 to 260.

Today’s plan

I wrote today’s blog as I went along yesterday, and scheduled it to post at the end of the day. Hopefully, it posted at 8am this morning.

The plan for today is more of the same. With the poet now working from home, for the time being at least, I’ll probably fit the dog walk in with his work schedule.