Glimmer/glow spreadsheet

Friday

Very late on Thursday night, my short story New Year’s Revolution was published in Illumination on Medium.

When the postie called at about 11am, she brought me a competition prize… a purple collar with a bell on for the cat.

I couldn’t help but wonder what my third piece of good luck would be before the weekend…

Anyway… first thing Friday, after my daily handwriting Pomodoro, I went in and updated all of my links for the short story and shared it to social media. Then I updated my glimmer/glow spreadsheet.

The image above shows my glimmer/glow spreadsheet open on the short fiction worksheet. This is what I’m using to keep track of my progress. (Ignore the mini timer. That’s my Toggl time tracker.) In this workbook there are sheets for:

articles
short fiction
long non-fiction
long fiction
serials & series
book reviews
calls for submissions

The book reviews sheet is much smaller as there’s only so much I can do with a book review. And only the last page, the calls for submissions, isn’t a glimmer/glow.

The idea is that as the piece of work progresses, the colour gets steadily warmer, from a cool grey *glimmer* to a hot red *glow*. Here’s the other end of the short fiction worksheet:

The table is laid out in the order I’ll be doing things in future, but as these stories are already partway through the process, I’ve inserted ‘Medium’, ‘Magazine’, and ‘Kindle Unlimited’, because those are my three new publishing channels.

Once the stories have completed the missing bits, the colour will change in the title column to match the progress column they’ve reached.

So once they’ve all appeared on Medium, in the new magazine, and as Kindle Unlimited ebooks, the colour in the column will change to yellow, because the anthology has already been published.

I finished transferring The Ace of Wands to the exercise book for my Tarot Tales. I can now start the next story in the series, but I don’t know whether to write The Two of Wands first or The Ace of Cups. I know what happens in both, I’m just wondering in which order to write them.

The next job was publishing Chapter 8 of Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 on Medium. Next, I hacked up some of this post, added some from another, and wrote a bit more to create The Glimmer/Glow Spreadsheet, and I submitted it to another publication on Medium.

I didn’t really have time then to write Chapter 11 of Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 with two client jobs waiting for me. So I had something to eat, and then cracked on with the client work.

In the meantime, I think my third piece of good news came in. Within an hour or so of me submitting it, Writers’ Blokke had published my glimmer/glow story.

The first job of the afternoon was proofreading a website for the new client. But as this was the first time I had accessed their backend, naturally I encountered many teething problems. It’s a system I’d never used before, and the client hadn’t managed something in this manner before either.

And… it took up the rest of the afternoon.

So off went another email to the ghostwriting client, because I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to do any more that day, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do much work on Saturday either, as Monkey Dust had a festival to play at.

The client was great and made me feel even more guilty just because he was so nice about it!

While I was packing up, we were treated to a free aerobatic show from the Blades, including this pilot who Tweeted this about it a bit later. Then we went and did the shopping and got a takeaway for tea to give us more time on Saturday.

Here’s what happened on Friday:

wrote 691 words of The Ace of Wands into the Tarot Tales exercise book (691 words)
formatted and published Chapter 8 for Project Management for Writers: Gate 1 on Medium
wrote and submitted The Glimmer/Glow Spreadsheet to a Medium publication (403 words)
shared links for the Medium stories on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
added the new stories on Medium to the master index
50 billable minutes of proofreading for the new client
started today’s blog (664 words)

Words written today = 1,758 words

Saturday

The poet had to go and get new strings for the music show later as the ones he’d ordered online hadn’t come yet, and we had run out of sunflower hearts for the garden birds, so he said he’d get some of those too.

While he was out, I decided to sit in front of the computer for a bit anyway, see what happened. While he was out, the strings he’d ordered arrived… and he arrived home minutes later.

I didn’t get any paid work done, though, because by the time I’d finished doing the diary for the coming week, it was time for something to eat, and then we had to go out.

It was a charity gig the band were playing at, so they were only on for one set. And as they started at 4:15pm, that still meant we had the entire evening ahead of us. I decided to chill for a bit before tea, and maybe work later.

He watched a big, annual fishing contest he’d recorded that had taken place just down the road from us, and I went back to work. Had he not been working himself, we might have gone along to the fishing contest, for a look.

I wrote most of a chapter before calling it a night.

Here’s how Saturday went:

diary work
Monkey Dust gig
wrote most of Chapter 13 of ghostwriting book #5 (1,220 words)
continued today’s blog (346 words)

Words written today = 1,566 words

Sunday

We decided not to go out on Sunday after all as the poet was off on another several-day business trip on Monday. So while he pottered and pootled and did stuff in the studio, I faffed with newsletters on Medium.

I’m still in the middle of a free 7-day course on newsletters, but I’m hoping that soon I’ll have a newsletter for followers to subscribe to. I want to create a freebie that’s exclusive to subscribers, so I’ve set my subconscious to percolate on that as well as the competition.

I don’t even know yet what to include in a newsletter. But I’m researching a few to see what others do.

Then I did some ghostwriting. (Yay!)

Here’s what I did on Sunday: