Pomodoro time again

It’s another long-un, folks. Either save it for later or go get that coffee now!

Tuesday

At precisely 8:26 on Tuesday morning, the cat jumped on the bed and yelled at me to wake up. I must have slept well, but I was still feeling a little weary. However, I had a lot of work to do, so I had to get up.

I’m trying to read more, so that I can catch up with my NetGalley reviews but also because I like reading and I particularly enjoy reading writers’ guides. I’m currently reading an Ambrose Parry for NetGalley, and I started to read the Teach Yourself Get Started in Creative Writing.

When I’m busy, Pomodoros help me to stay focused as well as remind me to take a break. I have them set in 50-minute work sessions and 10-minute breaks, as this works well for me. On Tuesday, the Pomodoro timer came out.

I’ve decided that I want to reconnect with my writing again.

When I’m doing the ghostwriting, for speed, I’m creating directly onto the screen in Scrivener. This works really well for this kind of job, and I do it for some of my other work too. But I have been feeling disconnected from my other work.

So for my first Pomodoro work session, I carried on writing out by hand the first of my Tarot Tales short stories. The Ace of Wands is already complete, but I want all of the Tarot Tales short stories in one place, and I want them written by hand at least once.

I’ll add the word-count to my daily tally because I’m still physically writing. Saying that, when I come to write The Two of Wands, I think that will go straight in the book too. Or the first draft at least.

I also had to create a new book cover in Canva for Diary of a Pussycat: a year in the life of a freelance writer.

This book is practically complete. I was in the middle of proofreading it when the client work went a bit nuts. Now I’m focusing on some of my own work again, this is one of the projects that has been moved towards the top of the list.

I did have a cover, but I noticed that the ‘Diane Wordsworth’ part had too much orange space beneath it. (The new cover’s in the sidebar now, under ‘in production’.) but this cover was originally created in CreateSpace, and those covers are no longer available.

So I had to find a font that matched the one on Diary of a Scaredy Cat: a year in the life of a frightened writer as the font I used for that isn’t on Canva. When I was happy with the new cover, I posted it to the sidebar on here. When I get around to it, I’ll probably do a new cover for Scaredy Cat too, so that they match.

The next book in this series of writers’ guides is Diary of a Tiger, but I haven’t come up with the sub-title yet.

In my next Pomodoro work session, I started today’s blog post. And then I published Chapter 5 of Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 on Medium. By the time I’d formatted that, shared the links, and had a quick look at social media, I was on a break again.

During my third Pomodoro work session, I formatted the short story New Year’s Revolution on Medium and I submitted it to a publication. Then I had a quick look at the Scrivener file for Project Management for Writers: Gate 1, and I added a mahoosive 5 words.

Then it was dinner time. So I hung the washing out, made my salad, and read some more of my book. I also fielded a few emails regarding a beta reader for the project management series.

After dinner, it was back to the ghostwriting, this time gig #5 Part 2. But I did sneak onto Medium again to tweak and submit an old Wednesday writing prompts to another publication.

Ghostwriting gig #5 Part 2 is not going well. I really struggled to remember the storyline and wasted valuable time re-reading some of it to remind me. I opened up Chapter 11 in Scrivener, but I really had to squeeze the words out.

At about 10pm, I realised that I wasn’t getting anywhere. So I fired off an email to the client to warn him that it would be late, and called it a day.

By the time I got up on Wednesday morning, he’d replied, saying that he completely understood, and to let him know as soon as I had either an update or the next instalment. How ace is this client?

Here’s how Tuesday went:

wrote 708 words of The Ace of Wands into the Tarot Tales exercise book (708 words)
formatted and published Chapter 5 for Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 on Medium
shared links for the Medium story on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
added the new story on Medium to the master index
added 5 words to Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 (5 words)
formatted and submitted New Year’s Revolution to Medium
formatted and submitted an old Wednesday writing prompts to Medium
arranged a beta reader for Project Management for Writers (all 5 Gates, but she may not know this yet…)
added 1,510 words to ghostwriting gig #5 Part 2 (1,510 words)
started today’s blog (581 words)

Words written today = 2,804 words

Wednesday

We all slept really well on Tuesday night and even the cat didn’t come and wake me up. In fact, I found her curled up like a small cushion on the spare bed. The dog got me up once, at about 2:30am, but other than that, we had a good night.

The poet was due back on Wednesday. (Yay!) When he set off at 8:40am, from the south coast of England almost, his sat-nav said he would be home, in Yorkshire, in 3 hours, at 11:40am. We did wonder where he’d be joining his Chinook to fetch him here.

My first job once again was another 742 words of my handwriting exercise. Then I opened up this blog post so that I could update it as the day progressed. Next job was this week’s Wednesday writing prompts.

I was just finishing the prompts off when the poet rang. He was ten minutes behind his ETA… and still in Nottinghamshire, where the Chinook clearly had to make an emergency landing. But it meant I had to dash out and pick up our repeat prescriptions before the doctor’s closed at 12:30pm.

I had just got home and was hanging out some washing in the garden when the poet pulled up. It was 12:20pm. His sat-nav was only 40 minutes out. That same journey took him 6 hours the other way on Monday.

I broke early for dinner then returned to my desk to find out that one of my stories had been published in Feedium on Medium. So I then had to go in and share the links everywhere.

On Tuesday I started a free course via another Medium user on setting up an email list/newsletter. Wednesday’s ‘lesson’ sent me off to claim my email service provider and I had to create an email address that includes my domain name before they would accept me.

I finally got around to sharing Chapter 6 of Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 on Medium. But then I had to turn to client work, which was a shame because I wanted to write Chapters 10 and 11 of the book, and now I’m behind on that too. BUT… I’d done a lot of my own stuff.

After a few false starts and a few more distractions, I eventually got over the ghostwriting hump. I deleted a load of stuff and only added 639 words, but I know where I’m going with it now.

Here’s how Wednesday went:

wrote 742 words of The Ace of Wands into the Tarot Tales exercise book (742 words)
wrote and published yesterday’s Wednesday writing prompts (503 words)
formatted and published Chapter 6 for Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 on Medium
shared links for the Medium story on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
added the new stories on Medium to the master index
created a domain-specific email address
opened an email service provider account
added 639 words to ghostwriting gig #5 Part 2 (639 words)
finished today’s blog (802 words)