This post was going to be a ‘weekend off’ post and it was going to post yesterday. Then I remembered that I also had a publication day post for yesterday, so the weekend off post was added to the NaNoWriMo Day 8 post.
Day 5
Day 5, or Friday was supposed to be a day off for me. I was supposed to have a holiday with the poet, but I had a ghostwriting deadline. So I reported to my desk in order to work on that for much of the day. I still took the day off from NaNoWriMo, as my calculations included Friday as a day off.
Of course, it wasn’t the only thing I worked on. I also did some publicity work for the latest in my ebook publishing program, I did some blog work, and I did some community posting on Medium and in the NaNoWriMo group I belong to.
I also worked out how to add the two ghostwriting gigs to the new word-count planning/progress spreadsheet. By the time I’d finished Day 8 of NaNoWriMo, I’d written not 13,925 words, as the progress bar shows, but 33,931 altogether – and there’s still a lot of November left.
Day 6
Day 6, or Saturday, was a weekend day already booked off. I didn’t finish the ghostwriting work on Friday, but I did finish it on Saturday. At 10:30pm. That’s all I did all day, while the poet did odd jobs around the house and also kept me fed.
We have a habit of leaving the back door open when the dog is in the garden because he’s a wriggler and does love to burrow and escape, so we have to keep an eye on him. On Saturday, the wind took the door and smashed it into our security light, which broke into pieces.
As it was drizzling with rain a bit on Saturday, the poet had to stop what he was doing and make the fitting safe. It was too late for us to go out and buy a new light, so we went without on Saturday night. (We live in the country, so no streetlights overlooking the back garden.)
Day 7
Day 7, or Sunday, was another weekend day already booked off and taken into account for my daily word-count target. After working solidly on ghostwriting, though, I was shattered. But we didn’t have a lazy lie-in because we had stuff to do.
- We had to do the weekly shopping
- We had to buy a replacement security light
- We had to eat (3 times!)
- I had to put the shopping away
- The poet had to fit the replacement security light
- I had to arrange enough packing for 4 days away for the poet
- Monkey Dust had a gig at 6pm, for which we needed to be there by 4:30pm
We got to the gig at 4:45pm. We hadn’t even had any dinner. The poet roasted a chicken and I sat and ate that in the car while he went to set-up with the lads. He didn’t have his chicken sandwich until we got back home at about 10pm.
Day 8
Day 8, or Monday, was my first day back on it. Having had a really busy weekend, though, and not having any time to ourselves, I decided it was time to organise my reading (again).
I have 194 books from NetGalley waiting to be reviewed. I also have two lots of kickstarter campaign books on my Kindle (or on my Fake Fire, as the new tablet is now called) as well as a 10-book book bundle I supported. And, of course, I have an existing TBR pile that would be as high as a tower block if I didn’t have the Fake Fire.
I needed to start organising it all; I had to get my planning hat out. (I do ❤️ planning!)
I started by transferring all of the NetGalley books from Trello to Asana. I thought that would be a quick job… It took me all day. All. Day. (There were 194 of them…) Then I decided which three books I’d read first.
Three books because I’d already started a John le Carré… his first one, in fact (Call for the Dead). This was one I recently bought rather than a review copy.
Then I chose the oldest Christmas story I had on NetGalley (A Christmas Gift, Sue Moorcroft), I chose the oldest book I had (The Clockmaker’s Daughter, Kate Morton), and the newest book I have (The Origins of Wizards, Witches and Fairies, Simon Webb).
And then I made a pretty Instagram post on Canva, as an extra visual stimulation. Then I made sure they were all on the Fake Fire, the mobile phone and the Paperwhite, so I can read them wherever I am without worrying about them downloading, or not.
Oh yes, and I published The Ace of Wands too, so there was some publicity sharing I needed to do for that.
Once I’d done all of that, I finally managed to do some writing for NaNoWriMo. I added 3,402 words to the tally, bringing it to that 13,925 total.
13,925/50,000 words. 28% done!
Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? How’s yours going?
