And she’s off … well, sort of …

29 September 2020 writer at work 0 Likes 193 Views

One of the scenes from around the fishing lakes on Friday.

Yesterday didn’t start as planned and by the time I settled down to work, it was almost time to start the ghostwriting gig.

Scrivener

I’d already tried and failed to open the Scrivener file for this work on Sunday. I’ve reinstalled Scrivener to my computer and I failed to copy across the templates I’ve generated myself, and I wanted to use one of them for this work. So as I was opening up Catch the Rainbow, I was reminded to go and look for the template.

Fortunately, I work off a memory stick now, but for a while we’ve both been backing up our critical data to a portable hard drive. And there, lurking in the depths of “templates”, I found my template.

Catch the Rainbow

This left me with about 5 minutes to do some work on Catch the Rainbow, and no time to do anything on Diary of a Pussycat.

I’ve decided that if I run out of time, then I stop whatever work I’m doing and move on to the next task. Hopefully, over time, this will encourage me to start earlier and stop faffing.

I did, however, at least want to finish the paragraph I was on, and so I managed 444 words (target: 775).

Perhaps today will be better …

Ghostwriting gig

And so began the new job. I decided to just start, and then stop at either 2 hours or 2,000 words, whichever came sooner.

At first I had to organise my Scrivener binder. This may seem like a bit of an unnecessary faff, but once it’s done, off I go. The binder initially took around 40 minutes to create, and then I saved it as a template. I thought I was ready to go …

This story is going to be just over 60,000 words, with 3 acts and 15 beats. I’ve given it 30 chapters of 2,000 words each and spread the chapters out 10/14/6. I think the middle bit should be a bit longer and the opening bit a bit shorter, so this may change. But for now, this is how I’ve saved the file and how I’ve saved the template.

By the time I’d inserted all of the outline, Scrivener was already counting 10,262 words, so now I needed to take those words out of the count. I had to go through and uncheck “include in compile” from every single folder and document until I arrived at zero. It took me a few attempts too, before I realised it was counting all of the folder and document titles too.

The job took the best part of 2 hours, and by then, it was dinner time. And not a single proper word written.

Perhaps today will be better …

Client work

I had a quick dinner and took the dog for a walk. I tried out my new trainers, with the laces, but while the ankles fared a lot better, the calves didn’t. I’m still out of condition and it was only a half-hour walk.

When I got back I was back in the saddle, this time on client work. First job of the afternoon is to check the job boards, but I didn’t even go there. I was already running late.

Instead, I did the screen edits for the work I did while we were fishing and I sent those articles back to the client.

Quick tea break and then it was on with the proofreading job – and I’d almost caught up on the time too.

Jobs to do today

Today’s jobs are pretty much the same as yesterday’s, with only the screen edits already done. And because I performed so poorly yesterday, I have changed the target word-counts today.