Wednesday 26 March 2025: Lots of tidying up

Writing the first scene of the new novella got me over the starting hump. Once that was down, the ideas started to come for the rest of the Act, and my mind was percolating over tea. I made a rhubarb crumble and the poet made a tuna pasta bake, and by the time tea was over, I’d managed to turn the percolator off again, hoping it would restart Tuesday morning. I spent a lot of the evening deleting stuff from Facebook.

I started the day over my dirty cuppa, deleted a load more stuff from Facebook, folded some washing, and shared yesterday’s blog post to BlueSky. Then I hopped onto Medium and started to delete all of my stories on there apart from the last 4 or 5. My paid membership there finishes today and I had intended on giving them another chance. But when I checked some of the other stories on there, things haven’t improved at all and, in fact, they seem to have deteriorated. 

Not worth my effort, so I deleted the longer stories and didn’t reactivate my membership. At some point over the next few weeks, I’ll delete the rest and then delete my account.

I moved back to Facebook with a view to downloading the photographs I have on there. But I saw that there are thousands. Thousands! So I started to download them all an album at a time, only to be told that it would take several minutes and they’d notify me when the first album was ready…When I didn’t get a notification for more than an hour, I knocked that idea on the head and chose instead to start downloading and deleting them individually.

So far I managed just a couple of dozen from February 2015. I have pictures on there going back to 2011. It will be a long job, but one I can nip on during down time between other work. 

And then I went back to 2018 on here and I started to clear out old blog posts. But again, I only managed a couple of months’ worth, there are so many. The Diary of a Freelance Writer posts are all in draft form now because they’ve already been stripped out to create a book. But I checked I had them in a Scrivener file before deleting them. I manage May and June 2018…

Sigh. 

It’s a big job deleting your online history, but I don’t trust that deleting my account will do it properly. I’ve seen search results to blog posts of mine dating back to 2005, on a deactivated blog! (It shows as private or error.) I have no plans to close down the website any time soon, but it will be closed down at some point in the future, and preferably before our executors have to worry about it. 

By the time I was actually ready to start some work, it was time to eat. And then my first writing job was to finish The Ace of Swords, which I did. 

I didn’t hear back from the client edit author, so I’m not cracking on with that just yet. I’ll probably spend a Pomodoro on it today, just to start it moving. And by the time I was ready to start working on the novella properly, it was time for my Zoom webinar on fast drafting.

Here’s yesterday’s task list: 

1. share Tuesday’s blog
2. write and schedule Wednesday’s blog
3. continue writing The Christmas Tree Mystery
4. finish writing The Ace of Swords
5. client edit
6. fast drafting webinar

And here’s today’s task list:

1. share Wednesday’s blog
2. write and schedule Thursday’s blog
3. continue writing The Christmas Tree Mystery
4. submit Mavis Braithwaite Strikes Again
5. client edit
6. building inspection

Today needs to be better.