Friday 21 March 2025: Friday already! Again!

21 March 2025 Leave a Comment writer at work 0 Likes 63 Views

Time flies so quickly! It will be April soon.

Having not yet settled on my next read, I didn’t do anything over my dirty cuppa yesterday, and I was at my desk before the allotted time.

Once there, the first thing I did was a quick and easy job. I shared yesterday’s blog post to BlueSky. Once I’d changed the scheduling, that is. I usually set it to post at 8am the following morning (so if it’s not there in the morning UK time, I haven’t actually done it), but it hadn’t auto-posted. When I checked, I’d left it at 17:15hrs. So I changed it to something like 9:05hrs, which meant by the time I arrived at my desk, it was there.

The next thing I did was fire up the Christmas cosy novella workshop to get me into the spirit for The Christmas Tree Mystery. I caught up with the videos to the end of the first Act, I printed off the workbook for the Christmas cosy novella, I reprinted the series sleuth workbook (because I didn’t have one yet for the Stevie Beck stories and they’ll be pretty much the same for each book in the series), I printed off some Christmassy things to remember to mention in the book and pinned it to the noticeboard over my desk, and I jotted down some more notes.

When the first workshop video was finished (about an hour long, just for the video), I hopped onto Deadlines for Writers so I could comment on some of the story challenge entries. A post I sent to their FB group on Wednesday was authorised, and I had a few responses to that, which I engaged with. And I got chatting with one person in particular with whom we share just one mutual friend: only the person who commissioned my Cadbury books and for whom I still edit.

We made friends on Deadlines for Writers, only to find that we’d also already commented on each other’s previous stories, and we made friends on FB too. Small world all round there.

I started today’s blog and I shared this week’s gig list post. Then it was back to the novella. I finished mapping out the first 3 chapters, but I did have a bit of a quandary. Because this is a Christmas story, I didn’t really want any bodies popping up anywhere. The person who runs the cosy mystery workshops also doesn’t like to have bodies in her Christmas cosies. But she says that cosy readers expect at least one body. So I chewed that over a bit.

My cosy crime will appear in the first Act, and probably by the end of Chapter 2 (of 12). If I do decide on a murder too, then the body will drop in the second Act. As I’m not working on Act 2 at the moment (I’m going to try writing Act 1 first and then pre-write Act 2), I don’t really have to worry about it just yet. It has, however, been deposited in the subconscious, so hopefully, by the time I get there, I’ll have a solution I’m happy with.

Speaking of the subconscious working on things in the background, I had a bit of a brain murmur for the story I wrote the day before. I didn’t have a title I liked and set the subconscious to work on a suitable alternative, at least for now. In the early hours of yesterday morning, Subconscious shook me awake and gave me my title. Mavis Braithwaite Strikes Again. Not a brilliant title, granted. But it’s apt, and it may still only be a working title. And it’ll keep me going in the meantime, which is the main thing.

I didn’t hear back from the author of the client edit, so I moved that to next week. I didn’t plan to look at it today anyway, so I’ve only really moved one day along. If I still haven’t heard from him by Monday, I’ll send him a quick email. I moved today’s proofreading to Monday too (the short story), as I had more spare slots on Monday than I did today.

I moved Project Management for Writers: Gate 3 to May. And I scheduled in Words Worth Reading: Issue 3. I only have A Mystery At Whitehorse Farm to revise for that (already scheduled) plus The Ace of Swords to finish and revise. Everything else is already done, but I have to set and proofread it all and write the blurb and the credits.

Then I turned to revising the short story. I needed a new title (TICK!) and 150 words (TICK). Yay!

Here’s yesterday’s task list: