I worked on Sunday after all

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

This post just keeps on posting itself, regardless of when I schedule it to post. This time, if it happens again, I’m leaving it up here.

The plan was to go out for the day somewhere. But when the weather forecast said it was going to rain all day, and heavily too, we decided to stay in and do stuff in our respective offices instead.

After dinner, we did go out to have a look at the mother-in-law’s new bathroom and to buy some food for the garden birds. But for the rest of the time, we worked or faffed or put washing away. (The poet was actually in the studio writing a new song.)

Sunday

I rattled off a few stories for Medium before publishing the penultimate chapters of Night Crawler and Diary of a Scaredy Cat. We broke for dinner and then went on our visit. By the time we’d reached the pet shop, Postcard from Ullswater had been accepted and published.

When we got back, and just so I could start with a clean slate on Monday – okay then, and so I could mark them as ‘done’ on my planners – I scheduled the last two chapters of the books too. One each.

Last job of the day was a quick look at ghostwriting gig #5.

This is how Sunday rolled out in the end:

moved Reedsy emails to ‘study’ folder (day 7 of 10)
wrote and published I wish I could unclap my claps on Medium (319 words)
wrote and submitted Polish your work before letting it go on Medium (411 words)
wrote and submitted Postcard from Ullswater on Medium (1,284 words)
published Chapter 32 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat on Medium
scheduled Chapter 33 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat to publish on Monday (final chapter!)
published Chapter 33 of Night Crawler on Medium
scheduled Chapter 34 of Night Crawler to publish on Monday (final chapter!)
shared links for the published Medium stories on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
made the link for Night Crawler free to Facebook friends
added the new stories on Medium to the master index
updated glimmer/glow and synchronised with Asana
finished chapter 1 of ghostwriting gig #5 (1,223 words)
wrote today’s blog post (374 words)

Words written today = 3,611

Monday

I had to act quickly first thing because I’d accidentally scheduled this post to post on Monday morning. I’d forgotten that there was already one in drafts waiting to go. And so I quickly removed this one again.

I had a busy day ahead of me with a target of 9,000 words for ghostwriting gig #5. So I planned to disconnect the internet and I pasted what I’d written so far into a Word document.

Other jobs I had to do included writing up my diary for the coming week, writing up my plan for July, and ghostwriting gig #6 was starting.

With so much work to do, it was a good job I got those last two Medium chapters scheduled ahead of time.

At 11am, I turned the internet off and went into the writing cave.

The target for session 1 (of 3) was to write 3,000 words. By dinner time, and my first break, I’d managed 2,073. This meant the 3 writing sessions should have turned into 4.

I had my dinner at my desk and caught up on social media, but just as I was going back to work, the internet fell over. It was a good job I wasn’t planning on working whilst connected.

I had already downloaded the desktop version of Asana (project management) and have been using that for a few days, instead of the web version.

I already had the desktop version of Toggl track (time tracking – and a reminder to have a 10-minute break every 50 minutes). I’d found that using the web version slowed down my computer, so I used a desktop version.

Scrivener is a desktop version, and I’d pasted the blog in Word. There was no need whatsoever for me to have an internet connection. And yet, having it there is a bit like having a comfort blanket to hand.

Instead of finishing browsing the web, I instead updated this blog post in the Word document. And then I went back to Chapter 3 on Scrivener.

I have all of my drafting in Comic Sans font because it’s really easy to read and makes me quite creative. I really do write much faster using this friendly font.

I just have to remember to change them all back to Calibri before I do anything with it all. And yes, I’m a ‘without twiddly bits’ kinda gal myself, despite what some editors seem to think of plain fonts.

Because the internet was a bit up and down, especially after a weekend of thunderstorms and during a really heavy rainstorm, when I could I nipped on to grab those links and update the to-do list and the indexes on Medium.

I also went and grabbed the template for my ‘plan for July’ post so I could add to that as I went along too. When it was done, I nipped on again and scheduled it to post on Tuesday morning.

Otherwise, I stayed off the internet for pretty much all of the day.

Here’s how Monday went:

moved Reedsy emails to ‘study’ folder (day 8 of 10)
planned blog and Medium posts for the week
did the diary for the week
shared links for the pre-scheduled Medium stories on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
made the link for Night Crawler free to Facebook friends
added the new stories on Medium to the master index
added the prescheduled links to the above ‘done’ list
wrote and scheduled Plan for July blog post (406 words)
wrote chapters 2 and 3 of ghostwriting gig #5 (4,160 words)
finished writing today’s blog post (602 words)
added 219 words to Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 (the poet’s bits)