Well, I said we’d catch up on the weekend today, but the truth is we didn’t do very much at all.
After his 4-day trip away, the poet was full of cold and feeling pretty miserable. His voice was just starting to heal and he gets knocked back again. He made us chorizo and rice for tea on Friday and we muddled together a pudding. Then we chilled in front of the telly.
The only thing we did on Saturday was the shopping. We went to the butcher and to the supermarket, and then we came home. I wasn’t very happy because the band had cancelled a gig that evening at least 2 weeks earlier, but the venue and the replacement band made it look like they’d let them down at short notice.
Fortunately, the band are bigger than that and they let it go. It may take me a little longer…
We had another evening vegging in front of the telly but when we got up on Sunday, I was full of cold as well! Again, I was only just getting over the last one and then in comes this new one.
The butcher’s youngest had sorted us a really nice piece of pork for tea and the poet put that in the oven while I made an apple and cranberry cinnamon crumble. Tea was delicious, but I found the crumble a bit ‘green’. That’ll be the cranberries.
The poet also did a lot of washing because we’re trying a washing powder to see if it’s the liquid detergent that’s causing my rashes. We’ll see how that goes.
He was up with the lark on Monday, still feeling dog rough, because he had a Teams meeting first thing. I got up afterwards and made us both breakfast before hitting my desk. I had a big job to do, similar to the short story file trees I worked on last week, but this time it was sorting a couple of Scrivener binders out.
The first one was the Great Novella Challenge binder. I’d created Book 1 of the challenge in another binder called The Nettie Campbell Mysteries, but the first novella also needed to be in the master for the challenge. So I duplicated everything and then created 12 projects all together in this novella binder, making sure they all had the same structure plus a characters section plus a places section.
Then I went and made sure the short story master Scrivener binder had all the current short stories in, starting with a folder for ‘in progress’ and then folders that replicate the short story file tree. This is where I MOVE the stories down rather than COPY them, or the file will just get too big.
Finally, I added any covers already made because, well, I like to see them when I’m working. They may change. The titles may change. The series or brand may change. But at least this gets me started.
I’ve done all of this because we’re away for a couple of days this week and I wanted to make sure everything I need is on the laptop.
I had a bit of a panic later when the latest short story binder didn’t have the latest material in. I’d deleted it from the cloud when I collected it on the laptop and this caused the one on my desktop to forget what I’d done. Fortunately, it was still intact on my laptop, so at least I could still work on it.
I started to print off the next editing job, but as I glanced over it to see what the layout looked like, I noticed there were a few things awry, like a chapter missing, or the wrong chapter number, or incomplete references to other chapters. Well, I’ve been there before with this editing lark and it’s taken me a lot longer to do the job than it should.
So I fired off an email with the client checking that I had the latest version before I contacted the author and asked him for it. I also had to ask her to upload the images to WeTransfer again as the original link had expired.
I wouldn’t have minded taking the hard copy away with us, as reading someone else’s hard copy would give me a break from typing on the laptop. Changing the work around like this is good for my posture and my eyesight as well as my concentration.
The client didn’t get back to me before I finished for the day, though, so I packed a work bag without it. I can still work on The Old Annexe and The Ace of Swords, which are both brand-new writing jobs. Plus I can still revise Whitehorse Farm. So I have plenty of work with me. I also packed a large non-fiction paperback book on mindful eating (how to do it) as well as my Kindle Paperwhite.
I did some prewriting for The Old Annexe and I wrote an outline for The Ace of Swords. Then I copied the information about the main character in Ace of Swords into the short story master file.
The day ran away with me and before I knew it, it was tea time. We had the apple and cranberry cinnamon crumble with custard this time, instead of Greek yoghurt, and it was much more palatable.
Sorry this one has posted late today. We’ve been travelling.
I hope you both feel better soon.
Thank you. Better now than in 2 weeks…