On Thursday evening I received a message via the contact form. It was from QueryLetter.com and it was to let me know that they’d given me an award.
I receive a lot of spam via the contact form, so the first thing I did was go and check that this was a genuine organisation. It involved some searching, but the upshot is that they are.
So, thank you very much to QueryLetter.com for awarding Words Worth Writing a Top Writing Blog award.
It reminded me of the old days, back in the mid-noughties, when most of us were on Blogger or LiveJournal or… was there one called Brave Journal? and WordPress was a distant twinkle.
In those days, we’d often receive awards for our blogs, usually from other bloggers. I think this is the first one I’ve had since moving to WordPress, ooh, must be more than ten years ago now.
Friday
Friday was supposed to be another NaNo day, but after grinding to a halt in the previous couple of days I really needed to have a good, long, hard look at the outline. I went back to my Save the Cat format, and put it all into a folder so I could do it in a comfy seat.
I also did a massive rejig of the diary. We decided that we weren’t going anywhere at the weekend after all, mostly because the poet had been away for 3 days and was shattered, and he wanted to do some (original) song work. So that gave me an extra 2 days to spread the work over.
I went into my Asana project master and put times against all of the jobs I have in for the two ghostwriting projects, for NaNo, and for the next edition of Words Worth Reading, which is due out on Monday 3 January, but I have to have it all put to bed by Thursday 16 December because we break up then for Christmas.
This week, then, alongside finishing Ghostwriting (1) Book 7 and continuing with the Ghostwriting (2) book, I’m also working on one short story already written and I’m starting a new one. I also mapped out next week, but I only did the diary for this week, in case things change.
Once I’d done all of that, I scooped up my NaNo project and my fake Kindle Fire, switched everything off in the office, and moved to the residential side of the house (aka everywhere that isn’t the office).
We watched Children in Need until 10pm and then caught up on a new Dan Brown serial on the telly.
Saturday
On Saturday the intention was good… and that’s about it really. We got up early to do the shopping, then when we got back I seemed to do anything but write. Saying that, I did jot down some ideas for NaNoWriMo and how to enhance it.
This is why I don’t usually schedule much writing work in at the weekend, unless I’m up against a pressing deadline. It really is a wrench to do any work.
Here’s everything I did do in order to not have time for work in the end:
- fed the birds
- manipulated a picture to hide a vehicle registration plate
- posted autumn picture to Instagram
- emptied the dishwasher
- asked the poet to look at the dishwasher (filter was blocked but I didn’t know where it was)
- filled the dishwasher again
- put a washing load through
- emptied the bins
- wrote a meal plan
- wrote a shopping list
- did the shopping
- put the shopping away
- baked a cake
- photographed cake
- posted a picture of cake to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook
- did dog poo patrol in garden
- scrubbed bird bath clean
- scrubbed bird drinker clean
- topped up bird bath and bird drinker
- played a game
- hoped that Sunday would be better
(I was tired, and so was the poet.)
However, Before closing everything down for the day, I did actually manage to add 1,250 words to NaNo…
27,124/50,000 words. 54% done!
Sunday
It was gone 3pm by the time I reached my desk on Sunday. But I did get there, and while I did my usual ‘warming up’ (i.e. scouring social media), the poet sat in my reading chair and finished writing some lyrics to a new song he’s working on.
By the time I opened all of my writing things up (Scrivener, Asana, word-count spreadsheet, time-tracker, NaNoWriMo word-count progress meter), he’d gone into the studio to record the vocals on his song.
The rest of my desk time was spent on NaNoWriMo, reading over some of what I’d already written and finishing a new chapter I’d started to insert on Saturday.
I only wrote an extra 1,059 words, but that meant my total for the weekend, which wasn’t even included in the overall calculation, was 2,309.
28,183/50,000 words. 56% done!
Monday
The plan was to get up bright and early on Monday and crack on with the ghostwriting work. For two nights on the trot, though, our sleep had been interrupted several times by the pets. The cat, in particular, has been jumping on the bed and yowling in our faces. Up to eight times, one after the other.
We spent Sunday waking the cat up at various intervals throughout the day, bringing her to wherever we were to keep her awake, and even an attempt at playtime.
She’s been nagging for a gravy sauce to be put on her breakfast every morning, so on Sunday night I put the gravy sauce out for her anyway. That kept her quiet until almost 6am on Monday, which was an improvement.
Unfortunately, the dog wanted out at 4:30am… So it was another late start and we didn’t get to ‘walk to work’, which I was hoping to start again this week.
I spent most of the day working on the NaNo project and hardly touched the ghostwriting. I’ve changed a bit of the NaNo story and wanted to make sure it all followed through now rather than at the end and risk missing something.
During this mammoth session, I only managed 1,473 words, which has put me way behind on where I need to be now. But the story’s much better for it and I’m hoping the words start to flow after today. However, I foresee working in my weekend…
29,656/50,000 words. 59% done!
