Monday 16 Jan 2023: Current WIP

Well, it seems that the WP to Buffer auto-shares worked okay, and I didn’t even have to check because I received not one but five emails (5): one from WordPress telling me my scheduled post had published; one from Buffer for each of the three channels confirming publication, and one from Buffer to say my buffer queue was now empty.

Then I received another email from Buffer saying I only get 10 schedules per channel… Now, I don’t know yet if that’s 10 per channel over all time, 10 per channel per month, or 10 per channel in the queue at the same time. Only time will tell.

Pomodoros

You know how these things work by now, and if you don’t, just take a look at the previous few blog posts before this one. There are link buttons to the last and the next blog post at the bottom of this one.

The first thing I did on Friday morning was check that Friday’s blog post (a) posted, and (b) was auto-shared. (ADMIN) The next thing I did was run through social media, as I was late (again). (ADMIN) Then I checked in on the current kickstarter I’m watching. (FAFF and – ultimately – PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT)

This current kickstarter is all about fantasy stories and I promised myself that if the campaign hit $15,000 (apx £12,250) then I would back it for $30 (apx £25). Well, it had passed the $15k-mark and so I backed it. Straight away I’ll get five volumes of short stories from Smith and Rusch, but the stretch rewards currently mean another five books on top of those (ten books so far) as well as four more pop-up writing workshops. Once I’d backed it, I also discovered they’d thrown in an extra stretch reward because the campaign is doing so well.

If the campaign meets its target, there will be another three books and another three pop-up workshops, all about writing fantasy. I’m not really a fantasy writer, other than my Toni & Bart time-travel stories, but I don’t mind giving it a go, and I’ll be interested to see if I can apply it to my other stories in any case.

The next thing I did was the daily competitions. (FAFF) And then I watched the last four videos of my locked room mysteries writing workshop. (PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT) The last video was the assignment, and I think it’s going to be hard, but I’ll give that a go too. I can turn it in to Dean Wesley Smith to hopefully read (or Kristine Kathryn Rusch if Dean’s still catching up on other stuff), there’s a forthcoming competition I could aim at, and also one of the weekly fiction markets is about to open its next submission window. But I think it’s going to be hard.

The JetPack support team asked me to fill in a contact form regarding not receiving any email telling me about their recent changes, so I did that. And then I turned my attention to my work.

Overnight, an email came in from the ghostwriting client with the amendments for the first instalment of the current job. I opened that next, saved it to a different working file with my initials at the beginning, and set to work on that. There was hardly anything, just a few minor points and one or two typos, which is great. I quickly made the changes and sent it back to the client. (CLIENT WORK)

I was a bit out of order with my work and client work and after I submitted the amendments for Part 2 of Book 12, I did my weekly scan and backup, and I did my diary for this week. I gave myself extra time slots for this coming Friday so I could schedule in the weekly tech work and the diary work. Until the ghostwriting gig is accepted and the next contract raises, I won’t put that in the diary. It does usually come in, though, almost as soon as they open the current instalment, and that means payment is authorised too. (ADMIN)

The plan was to go back to work for another hour, but I’d started to get dancing, flashing lights and blurred vision in my peripheral vision: uh-oh, was this a migraine on the way? It was as though the flickering of the computer screen that we can’t actually see had agitated my eye sight. I immediately went to lie down in a dark room for 10 – 15 minutes because often, if I catch it soon enough, I can stop the migraine in its tracks. It worked, but when I got back to my desk, the brightness of the screen was hurting my eyes.

I changed the display settings, on both the laptop and the monitor, and finished some easier jobs, such as declining a Reedsy job, but decided to call it a day and swapped out my colour tablet for my Kindle Paperwhite for the reading I still wanted to do. We didn’t have any plans at the weekend beyond shopping, so I could easily do some catch-up then…

Current work in progress

The above picture is the WIP that sat on my desk for most of last week and is still sitting on my desk today.

At the top is my lovely new FiloFax, which the poet got me for Christmas. The first week of this had a few crossings out while I got used to my new working schedule, but since then there have been few crossings out and more ticks. So that means it’s at least started to work.

I always, always filled in my diaries in pencil so that I could easily move stuff along, but it had got to the stage where everything was being erased and moved along several times. Now I’m writing in ink again:

• black ink for appointments, Monkey Dust gigs, reminders of deadlines or when payments are due out of my bank
• red ink for things like holidays, weekends, meal breaks, etc
• green ink for my work, and
• blue ink for client work

And this seems to be working fine… (famous last words?) I got the tip for the different coloured inks from Devon Ellington’s Topic Workbook Organize Your Writing Life (available here). And… well, it’s working. The colour-coded jellies (transparent folders) are my idea, and one I’ve used for years. When I have more than one hard copy project I’m working on, I also utilise red, green and clear jellies, and sometimes I have more than one per colour.

In the yellow jelly is Catch the Rainbow, which I’m gradually working through, consolidating all of the different versions, adding in and deleting where necessary, keeping stuff and discarding stuff as I go along.

In the blue jelly is Diary of a Pussycat, which is currently having the hard-copy edits transferred to the electronic version.

At the bottom, in the folio folder (I always wanted one like Jessica Fletcher has in Murder She Wrote, but this one is a throwback/keepsake to/from my five years working for the National Grid in Coventry), is the current client editing job. This was in a red jelly before it graduated to the ‘editing folder’, while the one before was in a green jelly. I use the folder because I can lean on it wherever I want to work.

What you can’t see here is the ghostwriting, which I compose straight on screen using Scrivener, and all the other stuff I do on screen, on the internet, and so on.

There is a filing drawer in my desk in which can be found yet more coloured jellies containing work, but these are the ones I’m working on right now and they will be replaced by those in the drawer as they’re completed, in coloured jelly order.

This is my current work in progress (WIP). What does yours look like?

Sign up for my newsletter
If you would like to receive my newsletter, please follow this link or use the form below to sign up and receive your first free short story.

And don’t forget, you can unsubscribe at any time.