I’m going to be busy

Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, mostly doing one of two things:

Planning
Ghostwriting

I break up for Christmas on 16 December. Before then I had 40,000 words to write for one client and 20,000 words to write for the other. And I had just under 2 weeks. Eek!

I have a Words Worth Reading to populate and publish in time for 3 January, which means I also have a novella to finish, two new short stories to write, and a series episode to write. That’s about another 30,000 words.

Or 90,000 words all together.

In 9 days.

Oh, that’s only 10,000 words per day. Er… Phew! It looks so much better that way… However, I think I see working during my holiday in my future. (More on this below.)

Last week

I spent much of last week on ghostwriting, on Asana planning and moving projects around, and scheduling a few blog posts to post this week. I also copied all of last week’s blog posts over to Medium, and I wrote a new article for Vocal and submitted a short story to Illumination on Medium.

The short story was accepted within an hour or so. The article was accepted about 24 hours later.

Two days were spent finishing NaNoWriMo, one day was spent creating publicity flyers on Canva, and the best part of a day was spent on the gig list, uploading the first wave of Christmas and New Year gigs as well as for the beginning of December.

Saturday

Yes, I worked at the weekend. I created my December multi-project spreadsheet, I updated the diary for last week and scheduled the work in for this week, I started the new job for Ghostwriting Client #1 (Book 8!), and I finished last week’s instalment for Ghostwriting Client #2 – working on that until 11:30pm.

Sunday

For most of Sunday I had a technology detox. We were going out to see the granddaughter in one of her gymnastics displays and I really didn’t want to be bothered by work of any kind. So I had a complete digital detox. We picked up the mother-in-law, went to the show, and came home again.

I *did* start reading my Kindle Paperwhite, because there are only books to read on there, and it’s mono, so no eyestrain from a coloured screen. But as we settled down to watch the first instalment of Get Back, I finally checked my emails on the phone – just in case there was anything urgent.

Ghostwriting Client #3 had approved payment for last week’s work, and authorised the contract for this week’s work. She’d also sent the revisions back already.

However, I did enjoy my digital detox and I might do it more often. Sundays seem like a good day if I’m not working at the weekend.

Monday

I was up early on Monday with the poet as he was off on another business trip, and that meant I was also early to my desk. That gave me chance to fire off an extra story to Vocal as well as copy Monday’s blog post to Medium. I also started today’s blog post.

The next thing I did was open up my NaNoWriMo binder in Scrivener for The Fool and transfer all of the new stuff over to the original binder for The Fool. However, it seemed that some of my features were broken in the original binder, despite working in the NaNo binder, and so I logged a message in the forum for support.

I started to do some brainstorming work on the series episode for Words Worth Reading (The Two of Wands), and I got the bare bones of the outline done, but a support techie came back to me on the Scrivener forum and we tried a few things. In the end, I had to excuse myself because by then I was on client time.

Tuesday

On Tuesday I made some momentous/executive decisions. I’m so busy at the moment, I had to or risk burning out.

The first thing I did was remove the ‘social hour’ from my diary and extend the ‘my work’ segment by one hour. That gave me more time to do my own work and I do social media over breakfast in any case. I must get up at 8am, though, so I can be at my desk by 9am in order for this to work.

The next thing I did was remove the ‘finish work’ slot at the end of the day, and extend the ‘client work’ segment by one hour. By doing these two things, I extended my working day by two hours.

Then I hopped on over to my publishing schedule and I moved publication of Words Worth Reading Issue 2 from 3 January to 17 January and brought the next two stories forward by a week each. That’s 2 short stories that are already written.

My problem with publishing Words Worth Reading on 3 January is that I actually break up for Christmas on 16 December. That doesn’t give me a lot of time to finish anything and polish it enough so it can be included (3 short stories and a novella).

Moving it to 17 January gives me another two weeks to finish everything, so four weeks all together. In future, I’ll be planning a lot further ahead and NaNoWriMo will already be scheduled in so I’ll work around that next year.

Moving Words Worth Reading also suddenly gave me three extra days over which to spread the rest of this week’s work. Now I’ve done that, I’m feeling less overwhelmed.