Wednesday 8 January 2025: Plan to faff

I really should know by now not to plan things too tightly. Or at least I should plan to faff as well. Maybe that way I’ll get more done.

Yesterday started well. I fed the birds before breakfast and was at my desk on time. The first thing I did was share yesterday’s blog to BlueSky and Medium. I didn’t share it this time to Facebook as it wasn’t a publication day. For now, at least, though, it does still auto-post to my writing page on FB.

And then it all went down hill…(And it was all going so well!)

I made the mistake of opening my Trello and seeing what boards I already had on there. We are restricted to the number of boards we can have open on the free plan, and I was at least pleased to see that I only had 5 live boards. When I looked at my closed boards, though, there were a couple of duplicates in there.

So the first thing I did was move everything I’m working on onto one Power Board, that replicates the Nobo board. I had one for short material, one for long material, one for Medium articles and stories…when really I only needed one for all of them. I added a coloured label per type (short story, novella, novel, article, non-fiction book) and that made it a bit easier.

I deleted all of the extra boards and went back to the main Power Board to remove all of the hundreds of different labels, some the same but in lower case instead of upper case, and all of the different checklists. Then I came up with a standard checklist that could be applied to all of them.

I’d already been thinking about my backlist and revamping it with updated material, but again, there were various different boards for various different things there too, such as an ALCS board and a PLR board. I didn’t need separate boards for everything. I only needed one board altogether. So I did some more copying and moving of cards and deleted another couple of obsolete boards.

To cut a long story short, I ended up with only 6 boards left open:

1. Book Reviews
2. Power Board
3. Bookazine
4. Post-Publication Progress
5. Medium
6. Newsletter

Book Reviews speaks for itself. That’s where all of my NetGalley books are, and a few others I’ve agreed to review, and where I can keep track of several things, such as how many books I have in the TBR pile and where they’ve been reviewed.

The Medium board is where I keep or move anything I think might be suitable for publication on Medium. My own material (books, stories, articles I publish myself) is copied to this board after it’s been everywhere else, but there are some short articles I want to write just for Medium. 

I haven’t really got to grips with the Newsletter board yet, but it’s there and I do intend to be more organised with that.

The other three boards, 2, 3 and 4, are for keeping track of everything I write from mild brain murmur (Percolation) through to Publishing, at which point it jumps off the Power Board and onto the Post-Publication Progress Board. Anything that can go into the Bookazine will be moved there first. 

At the end of both the Power Board and the Bookazine Board I have ‘Move to Post-Publication Progress’. And this is where I hope to keep track of where I’ve registered anything I’ve published (ALCS, PLR, Legal Deposit). There’s a list second from last on the Power Board to ‘Copy to Medium Board’, where there’s a ‘Done’ list by the time it’s been used on Medium. This is the only place where cards are Copied and not Moved.

So, so far so good, yes?

Actually, no.

It was when I got onto the Post-Publication Progress Board that I fell down a hole. It’s been so long since I kept on top of this that I haven’t registered anything for more than a year. There was a cyber attack at the British Library, which meant no one has been able to make a digital deposit there, and for a time, we couldn’t use the PLR forms either as they were linked. But I’d been so slack that I hadn’t picked it up again.

As it turned out, digital deposit is still out of bounds at the moment, but there was an enquiry email where we could send, well, an enquiry into what to do with out digital deposits. (Digital deposits cover ebooks and hard copy books if applicable, we don’t have to send them twice – or we might have to for now.)

I had a conversation with a lady there who responded quickly and told me how to send digital deposits, and I fired off a couple immediately (and immediately updated my Trello Board). 

I checked ALCS to see when the last one I’d registered there was, and it was when we started to get ISBNs that began with 979. Their system couldn’t cope with these 979 numbers for some reason and we had to email them across for them to upload. I did think that might have been resolved more than a year on, but yep, you’ve guessed it, it hasn’t. So the ebooks I emailed to Legal Deposit were then sent over to ALCS too.

Finally, I checked PLR and updated my Trello cards with those books they already had. Then I uploaded the first 10 (ebook and paperback count as one entry on my Trello cards). 

My internet was up and down, on and off, all day, though, and I kept getting thrown off the PLR website. So I called it a day after the 10 and forced myself to return to the schedule.

The next job I did was more Fallen Angel pre-writing for the Great Novella Challenge, and then I turned to today’s blog post. 

By this time it was dark outside and 5:30pm gone. The poet was almost home, and my eyes were getting gritty and my shoulders were aching. So I called it a day.

Today I will try to at least stick to the schedule a bit more until I’ve added ‘faffing’ as a daily task…