Monday 6 January 2025: Publication Day!

So, I’m officially back from my annual Christmas holiday. We had a lovely break. I hope you had a great time too.

Thursday and Friday of last week were gentle, slow-paced days when I didn’t have anything scheduled. I was on holiday after all. But it was the ideal time to set everything up for 2025, and, of course, to wrap-up 2024.

Thursday

Once I’d made us both breakfast (the poet was working from home on Thursday), fed the birds and started a washload off, my first 2 Pomodoros on Thursday were spent on the 2024 wrap-up. Because I hadn’t kept a review file running throughout the year, I struggled to remember what happened when. The first Pomodoro was spent on the very brief 2024 review.

Then I moved on to the December wrap-up part of the post, which was a lot quicker because it was already there. I just had to tick or not tick the list, and I added only 2 extras: the Medium stories and the word/page count.

I created a new folder on my desktop computer entitled 00 LIVE WORKING 2025 and saved the blog posts Scrivener file to there, in 01 WRITING ⇾ 02 NON FICTION. I also created a new backup folder in 00 LIVE WORKING 2025 ⇾ 00 ADMIN ⇾ 01 SCRIVENER FILES.

Next I moved onto my spreadsheets for the year, starting with my 12-project planner. Yes, it made it to the new year with me! (Hands up everyone who’s surprised!) Then I opened up my new weight-loss tracker. I saved them both to new folders in the new directory.

The plan here is not to have so many folders when I’m not using them all and only copy the LIVE WORKING folder to the cloud when I’m working on the go. Scrivener needs backup files to work on different devices and I have to remember I copy those across as well and then remember to close each project down completely on each device before trying to open it on the other device.

I created a folder for the novellas, and copied the GREAT NOVELLA CHALLENGE folder over as it’s a year-long project. Ever time I export/compile a file, I’ll date it too, for the day I’ve been working on it, and keep it as a .doc file, which still works in LibreOffice. That way I can also open it in Word when I need to.

I’d love to be able to get rid of Word, but my editing client uses it so I can’t. 

I replicated each of the folders I already know I’ll be using in 2025, then transferred over only those stories that are live working this year. But this time, I remembered to tag on the 2025 part as I think that will make things less complicated in the future.

I created a record of submissions for 2025, a reading log, and my publication schedule, and copied them all into my LIVE WORKING folder. 

And then I published Take Your Pick (which is available, as ever, from Books2Read.com/DianeWordsworth). I also nipped over to Google Play Books and uploaded it there. It went live on Google Books within about an hour. At the time of writing, I was still waiting for it to go live on Draft2Digital. (EDIT: Its there now!)

I know what the delay will be. It’s a very short story and they don’t like very short anything. But this is Book 11 in the flash fiction series, so there’s a precedent they’ve told me I have to remind the checkers of if/when they bounce it back to me.

By the time I’d done all of that, I was ready to continue with my holiday. It was 5pm, and I felt like I’d done a full day.

Friday

So most of Thursday was spent wrapping up the highs and lows of 2024 and the month of December. Most of Friday was spent planning the month ahead. I want to start as I mean to go on, so I’m trying to get it as right as I can from the offset.

I had a hair appointment in the morning, so didn’t have a lot of time to get my teeth into anything before I went. Instead I spent the time reading and thinking. I also checked the dates for the Space Opera workshop I’m study along with, and I was a bit startled to find that it starts on 13 January for 4 days.

As Dean Smith releases the videos on the evening of the first day of the live workshop, I won’t be able to watch any until the following Tuesday morning. I also know that there are likely to be 3 assignments that have to be in that week, and I’ll have less than a day to write the 3^rd one.

When I got back from the hairdresser, I went straight back into the planning, starting with the bookazine. I was certain I’d got the bulk of the bookazine already done, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I started to collect everything together in one place (i.e. the new LIVE WORKING folder).

The bookazine dictates my short story writing, but I also need a novella for the January issue. I already have Part 3 of Night Crawler, for the instalment. But Whitehorse Farm needs revising. I also have to write the last brand-new story for it, The Ace of Swords. So all of that has to be built in around everything else.

I checked the email address for the client edit author I emailed before Christmas, as I hadn’t heard back from him. Yup, it was a different email address. So I forwarded him the original email and gave him a bit longer to get back to me. It’s good from my point of view. I won’t have to start that this week now.

Once I had all of my ducks in a row, I finalised last Friday’s Hello, January! post. I went and made the image in Canva. And I published it straight away. Then I added this week’s tasks and jobs to the diary.

Finally, I decided on the next novelette for the Great Novella Challenge (Fallen Angel), the next short story that needs finishing (Killer Queen), and the next 2 short stories that need starting. 

Tomorrow, we’ll catch up on the weekend and how today went.