Diary of a Tiger: Wed 7 Dec 2022

Chapter 57: Wednesday 7 December

First job of the day today was planning work.

I already know I have a lovely new FiloFax coming for Christmas, along with day to a page inserts and to-do lists, but I still keep my A4 ring-binder for the think/write/submit topical short story ideas. So I needed next year’s calendars for that – a regular 12-month calendar with all the dates on, and a yearly planner with enough room against each day to write one thing.

Aside from the ideas binder, I also wanted to jot down the publishing schedule for next year, which will be at least one book a month on the last Monday of each month. But before I could do that, I had to mark up the fixed dates I already know.

Armed with a yellow highlighter, I went through and first blocked out all of the weekends, then all of the bank holidays, and then the 3 holiday periods I already know we intend on taking next year.

Once that was done, I went through the Monkey Dust calendar and jotted down all of the Monkey Dust gigs already in. And there I went off down my first rabbit hole, because as I listed the gigs, I realised that there weren’t that many dates left in the Monkey Dust 2023 calendar. So the next thing I did was go onto their Facebook page to draft and announce what dates are still available. Six months are already full and 3 months only have one date left.

And that was as far as I got on planning before I had to start the next job on the list: Book 12 for Ghostwriting Client #1.

I opened up the Scrivener file to get started… and there was an update waiting to be installed. So while I set that off, I went to catch up on the daily competitions… and there was my second rabbit hole of the day, because not only did the update take some time, but then I had to install it as well.

I corresponded with GW1 client about something else, brought them up to speed with the week’s events so far, and went to start again, but it was still installing. So I switched to an editing job I’d forgotten about that needed printing off, and before I could print it, I located it, saved it with my own prefix, ensured it was clean, did some quick formatting, and then stood over the printer as it churned out 156 pages.

Yes, I do still edit hard copy first. It exercises different eye and posture muscles and I spot things on the hard copy that my eyes would scan over on the screen. Plus it gives the work an additional pass.

Now I’ve printed that, I know I need another ream of printer paper and at least one new printer toner in stock to tide me over the Christmas period. The paper I can get from the supermarket, although the price is starting to creep up. The toner I have to order and hope it comes in between the postal strikes (which I fully support, by the way).

I didn’t do as much as I would have liked, but I did get through more than I thought I had.

We’re off on our first Christmas outing of the year tonight, and some time was spent (a) trying to find out what time the band is likely to be on stage, and (b) wondering if we’d have time to eat out as well and make a proper date night of it.

We did, so I rejigged the diary for the week, tidied up the print-out, quickly wrote up today’s blog post, and called it a day.

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