After a busy and lazy weekend we struggled to get up on Monday. And while I was having breakfast, I wandered off down another rabbit hole, this time watching a 2-hour video on planning your writing. The video was aimed at 2024, but I’m assured there will be another one for 2025 as she’s been doing it for about 4 years already.
I didn’t spend the entire 2 hours just watching it. I ran it is a sort of podcast while I did other things. And then I went and collected the resources that go with the website. I need to be able to see my planning and various stages at a glance, particularly for the great novella challenge, and I think some of the resources will help or at least give me new ideas to try.
Once at my desk and settled, I wrote yesterday’s blog post. But as I was doing that I could see that one of my social share connections had broken. It was LinkedIn. LinkedIn ALWAYS breaks. But when I went in to update it (again!), my screen went blank. My Jetpack went blank. My WordPress went blank. And when WP eventually came back up, it was with a horrid template.
I managed to break into Jetpack again, and I saw it had gone into troubleshooting mode and defaulted to a WordPress theme. I got it out of troubleshooting, and all was well again. And this time it let me update my LinkedIn link.
Once the post was finished, I nipped onto Canva to create the image, and I published it. I shared the post to Bluesky and to Medium, and I tidied my stories on Medium. I delete the blog posts from Medium when they’re a month old so my story list isn’t cluttered, and I have to remember to move the bookmarks too. I have a rhythm now for that, and it seems to be working.
I had a quick 5-minute declutter on my emails. And I archived and removed another month’s worth of blog posts. I’m currently in May 2016 for this clean-up operation. Most of these blog posts have been regurgitated for the Diary of a Freelance Writer series, which I stopped doing after Book 4. Those that haven’t are at least backed up now in a Scrivener file.
Next, I went around emptying the bins because it’s bin day today. I did some shredding and took that out to the recycle bin. Whenever I finish a client edit, I prefer to shred it and take it out rather than take it out in its entirety. I didn’t think they’d recycle shredded paper, but they will and ask that you put it in a suitable envelope or a paper bag. I don’t have either, so it just has to go in the bin as is.
My next job was this week’s diary. Because I had Thursday and Friday off last week, this week’s diary was moved to yesterday instead of Friday. I had a look at my TickTick to see if I could see a gantt chart, as part of the writing planning mentioned above. There isn’t a gantt chart as such, but there is a timeline feature. If I can get my head around that, I might be sorted as far as a gantt chart is concerned. And if I can use it alongside all my other writing tools, then great!
When I went to add in the details of this weekend’s Christmas market, the website said it had already gone, last weekend. I checked the event on Facebook, and it definitely said this weekend, but on the website there were reviews (not very good ones) from the weekend just gone. We’ll have to look into that further before deciding to definitely go.
Finally, I finalised today’s blog post, chose the picture, and scheduled it to post. We had snow forecast later in the evening, but according to my watch it was already snowing…
I hope you had just enough snow to enjoy, and not so much it was a difficulty.
Thank you. Fortunately for us, we’re both home-based this week.