Monday 13 May 2024: Another dental appointment!

First job Friday was rejigging the schedule over the next few weeks. I had to move a lot of things down the calendar that I didn’t get around to over the past 2 weeks, for one reason or another. Aside from the 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS stories, only one story has a concrete submission date at the moment. So I built the rest of the next 8 weeks around those – the 12 stories for May and June and the June submission.

This doesn’t seem a lot, but I did spend a couple of hours on it. To make things easier, I went through and removed due dates from short stories that don’t have to be written yet. That made moving the others around the calendar a lot easier. I’ll try to revisit this once a week. Probably on a Friday before I do the following week’s diary.

All of that rescheduling took some shaking around, but once I’d done that I was able to update the diary for this week. Then I did my weekly backup. The poet was working from home and had a few Teams calls, so I stayed out of the way while he attended those. When he’d done, I moved into the office and caught up on my Halloween cosy mystery novella course.

I had a good session working on the cosy mystery. I created my sleuth, sidekick (confidante) and authority figure, and I started to percolate on 4 of my 5 suspects. I created a load of other characters, both supporting and walk-ons, and I created my A to Z character list to ensure I don’t have 99 characters with names beginning with D. (This is something I always do. Too many authors seem to forget such a basic step.)

There’s still some work to do. I need to work out my motives. The main motive I have feels a bit twee to me, a bit done to death. But it’s a start. Plus, of course, I have to remember that this is a cosy, not a dark and gritty thriller.

I spent a good few hours on that, and for my last job of the day I settled down to do some editing. Then we both packed up work to go and visit the poet’s mother. We’d not seen her for a couple of weeks.

Today I start to outline Act 1 of the cosy. I’m hoping some of the things I’m a bit stuck on start to work themselves out. I’m starting 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS for May too today, and I have my dental appointment to probably extract the tooth the crown fell off. If I feel okay when I get back, I’ll do some more editing.