I might not be clearing stuff off my to-do list in the order I’m supposed to, but I am keeping busy rather than faffing. Or most of the time at least.
Tuesday
Tuesday was a better day than Monday, despite having a bit of a rubbish night.
The poet left early (about 7am) to head south for a three-day/two-night work trip. I don’t like it when he goes away, but it does mean I get to work a bit longer, although I do have to get all of my meals myself!
He’d already cooked a quiche the day before, so that was what I was having for my tea. But I broke off at 5:30pm to go and put a jacket potato in the oven.
Here’s what I got through on Tuesday:
- wrote Tuesday’s blog post (392 words)
- epublished Chapter 7 of Night Crawler on Medium¹
- epublished Chapter 6 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat on Medium
- shared links for the Medium stories on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
- started a notebook for Night Crawler²
- updated the Night Crawler notebook with Chapter 1
- made all of the Night Crawler chapters on Medium so far free to friends on Facebook
- researched and approached 2 publications on Medium
- refreshed and updated the binder in Scrivener for the 3rd instalment of the ghostwriting gig
- wrote and submitted the blurb for ghostwriting gig #4 (435 words)
- chased an invoice
- wrote this week’s Wednesday Writing Prompts and scheduled it to post yesterday (491 words)
- a load of household chores, like taking the bin out and putting washing through
Words written today = 1,318
¹It may look as though these reposts on Medium aren’t a great deal of work. But they do have to be topped and tailed, reformatted and quickly proofread before they go up, and then I have to link with the previous instalment and the following instalment for each chapter. So they do take time.
²I’ve decided to start a notebook for each of my novels now. When I was planning and composing everything by hand, it all went into the same chunky notebook before it was typed. Even the first draft.
Now that I compose directly onto Scrivener, I don’t have that easily accessible reminder for all that has gone before. Yes, it’s all there in the Scrivener binder, but a lot of writing work is thinking work and it’s useful to just have everything to hand and easier to just open a book.
And so I started a new notebook for Night Crawler and I’m going through and writing it as I re-read the novel.
I finished work at 7pm.
Wednesday
Following another particularly barky night (I think the dog was telling everyone that the poet had left him in charge), I was late getting up again at about 9am. This isn’t too late, but I want to be at my desk by 9am these days, so already I was an hour behind.
It was a nice day, and so I got through another load of chores and put some washing through to hang on the line. I even got the shorts out!
Here’s how Wednesday went:
- epublished Chapter 8 of Night Crawler on Medium
- epublished Chapter 7 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat on Medium
- republished a Wednesday Writing Prompts from February on Medium¹
- shared links for the Medium stories on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
- made the link for Night Crawler free to Facebook friends
- got 100 ‘claps’ for 2 stories on Medium within minutes of them posting²
- wasted time keeping looking at all of my claps!
- wrote today’s blog post (797 words)
- started work on a query for the first in a series of articles on finance for writers (887 words)
- started work on a query for the first in a series of articles on markets for writers (10 words – broke the back of that one!)
- updated the Night Crawler notebook with Chapter 2
- made revisions to the ghostwriting blurb
Words written today = 1,694
¹Posting the writing prompts was a bit of a learning curve, because initially I imported the story from here, and that meant the date stamp was 24 February.
Unfortunately, that meant that Medium also published it with that date stamp, and that pushed it right down the list. So I deleted the original story, tried it again as a new story, tweaked it a bit, and hit ‘publish’. That worked.
²’Claps’ on Medium are like ‘likes’ anywhere else, and they translate to ‘fans’ in the stats. These claps made me ridiculously happy, so I wasted further time admiring them for a bit.
I finished work at 5:30pm
The poet will be back home today, so work will probably stop just as soon as he arrives. Or not long after. I need to get a lot more done before that happens, or I’ll be working at the weekend again.
