Isn’t my 12-project planner wonderful? I keep mentioning it, so I thought I ought to at least give you a hint of what it looks like. This image is of November.
I got it from a book I read, but when I went to get the correct credit, it seems the author’s taken it down. Or I’m looking at completely the wrong book. Either way, it’s a 10-project planner I’ve nicked and pimped customised to suit my own way of work.
The original was only for 10 projects, but that isn’t enough for me and 10 seemed a bit odd over one 12-month period. I’ve played around with it a lot, duplicated the file so I had one for ghostwriting, one for short stories, and one for editing/proofreading, and I had them all feeding into a single all-project workbook.
But when I switched to Mac and Libre from PC and Excel, I couldn’t get that consolidation workbook to work. So I duplicated the file for the last 3 months of the year to see if it will work for me that way. And, so far, it has.
Only today, for December, I added in the last 2 projects and I changed the name of one short story from A Winter’s Kiss to Let It Snow.
This is my specific monthly spreadsheet for November where I add in words written or pages revised for whatever I worked on in November. In the top left is the calendar for November. I changed this from an actual 2024 calendar for each month to a perpetual 31-day calendar that covers all months. In the middle is a bar chart for both words written and pages revised. And the main body has 12 projects not 10.
There’s a master planning sheet with all of the projects on as I add them, which also has total word-counts for each entire project as well as start and finish dates so I know how many words or pages per page I should be working on to hit my target. Again, I changed this from 10 projects to 12 projects and I’ll probably share that in the future.
And there’s a Totals sheet with words written at the top and pages revised at the bottom, illustrated with a pie chart. Again, I’ll share that too in a future blog post.
I changed the colours and I changed the charts from 1D to 3D.
In the future, once I’ve filled all 12 projects in, I’ll probably start a fresh workbook. This one is dated Oct – Dec 2024, and I have a blank one ready and waiting to start the new year.
I forgot to mention in yesterday’s blog post that grand-doggy #1 went back to his humans on Monday (they came to collect him), and the poet went off on his 4-day trip to Ireland. So I’ve been rattling around in the house on my own for the past couple of days and fending for myself.
Today I spent the entire day trying to write a 300-word story for 12 Stories in 12 Months. Initially, I had a 938-word outline for this 300-word story, and it was called A Winter’s Kiss. But I decided that the outline was too good for a piece of flash fiction, and I tried again.
This time I came up with a 363-word outline, for the same 300-word story, but this one was called Let It Snow. And it was so shallow that it did only need to be a 300-word story. Saying that, the first draft came in at 428 words so I probably trimmed another story’s worth off it.
BUT…I did it. I can’t believe it took me ALL DAY, and there was much procrastination to be had as well. But I did it.
Now I just have The Old Annexe to start, Whitehorse Farm to edit, and a number of other short stories in various stages of brainstorm/outline/write/revise/proofread, including one new one I need for the January bookazine.
I don’t know yet if I’ll continue with 12 Stories in 12 Months, but it does discipline me to write and finish projects. I’ll need a 12-project planner just for that, and another one for the Great Novella Challenge…
