Chapter 30: Tuesday 9 August – or ‘light at the end of the tunnel’
I worked really hard over the past week to finally shift those 2 massive jobs that were hanging over me. They were still there long after they should have gone due to those nasty technical issues I had a few weeks ago and then the backlog of work that built up completely draining me.
For 3 days solid I worked on the editing, just to put a big dent in it. On 2 days, I also managed a chapter of the ghostwriting, and I did some short story writing too.
In the middle of all of this, my car was due in for its MOT on Wednesday and was already 3 days past its expiry date. I broke off work to take it in, and when I got there, they didn’t have me booked in and were too chocka to fit me in. Well, I was home alone while the poet worked away and without a car, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. I booked it in for Monday morning.
The biggest push was on Friday, to try and clear the ghostwriting. I wrote through the night, until about 7am on Saturday, and I wrote 15,649 words. I submitted Part 4 to the client, promising them the bonus 3,000-word short story over the weekend. There was a message there waiting for me, asking if I could take a look at the outline for Book 11… I said sure, and went to bed.
After about 3 hours sleep, I woke up with a brain murmur – I’d forgotten to tie up a particularly important sub-plot. So I fired off an email to the client and let him know I’d send over a revision before the end of the day. We didn’t have a lot of day due to the poet’s band playing a wedding that evening, and during what day we did have, I was really, really brain-tired.
When he went off at about tea-time to go and set the room up, I did the revisions and sent them to the client. Then I had to get ready to go out when the poet got back.
On Sunday, I finished the bonus short story (3,156 words) and sent it to them, and on Monday, they approved the payment. It will be in my bank account on Saturday.
Monday morning dawned and first job of the day was to take my car in again. The poet was able to follow me this time, and we ran an errand while my car was in the garage. We got back an hour later and it was all done – and it passed! I’m hoping that’s a sign for the coming week.
Another Wordsworth Short was publishing on Monday: Shaking the Tree. You can read more about that in yesterday’s post. Due to working solid on client material last week, I hadn’t prepared the next one. Before I started work for the day (for clients), I proof-read one of the stories I polished last week and published that one. Fortunately, the cover was already done.
To ease me into the rest of the day, I played around with the diary for the week on the project management platform. It’s looking a lot more civilised, but I still have a lot of my own writing work to get through, some of it in order to meet my publishing challenge, and some of it in order to fulfil my CampNaNo this year.
I still had that massive editing job to finish, but I was less than 100 pages from the end. So I worked on that all day on Monday… then an email came in from the ghostwriting client asking if I’d looked at the new book yet.
The outline was 15 pages long and almost 7,000 words, but I came to a point where I could take a break and skimmed the outline. I let him know it looked okay, and by return the contract landed! We have a few holidays to take for various things over the next few weeks, so I have 4 weeks to get Part 1 (20,000 words) back to the client. I won’t do any writing this week, but I will do all the advance prep work with the outline and in Scrivener.
I plodded on with the editing and at tea-time I let the author know that I was 40 pages from the end (of originally 600 pages, which I first got down to about 450 pages, and then down to about 360 pages). He thanked me for the update by return, which means he was waiting for it, and I broke for tea.
After tea I cleared another 20 pages before giving up and calling it a night.
So, if I went AWOL, you know why now. At least I’m on top of everything again, though and normal service will be resumed over this coming week.
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