Chapter 55: Friday 2 December
So I’ve not done a Diary of a Tiger since 16 November. That’s dreadful, Diane! Not that I’ve been idle, of course. Or not all of the time at least.
For the tail-end of the first week, I was finishing an electronic edit for the history publishers. We were already behind on this due to the previous job taking a lot more time than expected (for all of us, not just me) and I knew the client wanted it back well before Christmas in order for it to go off to production. So I put NaNoWriMo to one side, finished the job, sent it to the author, and awaited the revisions to come back.
I jumped back into NaNo for a few days, but the author was quick off the mark with his revisions and they were all back by Tuesday of the following week. I was on a roll with NaNo, though, and some extra revisions were dribbling in from the author, so I gave him until the Thursday before checking his responses and applying any final changes.
The book went off to the client and I went back to NaNo. And then in the middle of it, I got sick and then so did the poet. Fortunately he had no gigs to go to, and fortunately I only had NaNoWriMo left to write, having cleared the decks of all other editing and writing work. I still stepped up and showed up, though, even if only for a few hours here and there.
It was a bit of a tight rush and I took NaNo right up to the wire… or the last day at least, but I did it with words to spare.
Thank goodness I’ve been feeling a bit better towards the end of this week. The poet is still suffering, but he’d looked after me for almost an entire week, despite feeling dog rough himself.
Once NaNo was done, I did allow myself to take a bit of a breather, hitting the desk for only a couple of hours yesterday and today, concentrating on the somewhat leisurely task of planning for next year. (See Thursday’s post.)
I’m still doing planning work today, and I did decide (again!) not to do the fan fiction ghostwriting, although I did offer her my editing services instead. I have yet to hear from her, but the fan fiction is currently a massive weight off.
I really don’t think I can ghostwrite 2 different stories at the same time without jeopardising something (either the quality or my sanity), and I’d forgotten that I’ve recently been accepted by Reedsy. So if she doesn’t take me up on the editing offer, my income octopus already has a new tentacle there.
If she does take me up on it, then the 2 short story tentacles will be merged together and I’ll use the newly spare one to merge both Reedsy and Upwork, as they’re both the same kind of work and I don’t currently have a tentacle for Upwork.
Today, then, it gave me immense relief to remove the fan fiction chapters from my ClickUp schedule. Now all I have to do is move everything else along again…
Have a great weekend!
PS Hands up everyone who noticed the snow on the blog… 
(Graphic courtesy of Animated Emoticons.)
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