Faffing with shiny, sparkly things again

Because it’s not as if I’m busy…

When you go onto my author page at Amazon, it defaults to ‘sort by popularity’. There, at the top, are the last three short stories I published on Kindle Unlimited.

They’re all free for members, and they shuffle around a lot, but the reports aren’t showing any further activity.

Scroll down, and Night Crawler Kindle edition is #8 on the list – or it was at the time of writing. The paperback is at #20, on the next page.

I’ve been serialising Night Crawler on Medium, along with Diary of a Scaredy Cat, as the start of my latest push, and they’re both coming towards their end. And I’ve also started work on the sequel, The Beast Within.

Tuesday

So, to help it on its way, I’ve been faffing. And I spent all morning on Tuesday creating new flyers and then Tweeting about Night Crawler. While I was there, I also reTweeted a load of stuff for some friends.

The Reedsy (e)lessons arrived first thing. I quickly scanned them and moved them to their own folder. I’m not sure when I’ll sit down and look at these more thoroughly, but I will do that at some point.

Once I’d finished faffing, I did a quick read of some of the blogs I enjoy. They’re in a tab on my computer under ‘reading’. Then I did my timed 5-minute email declutter.

I published my two chapters on Medium and added an alphabet adventure. As mentioned above, the two serialised books are coming to a close. I’ll replace one of them with Project Management for Writers, and I’ll replace the other one with at least one new story a day.

Moving the project management book to Chapters on Medium means I have to get on and finish it. I’m currently on Chapter 8, so that means I have 9 chapters ready already.

The first two ‘chapters’ are ‘introduction’, which is an introduction to the book, and ‘the gates’, which is an introduction to the gates. I need to give the poet a kick up the bum first, though, as I’m still awaiting his input on Chapters 1 – 7. (He’s my guest consultant.)

Anyway, I digress, and I digressed again when I had to take a detour from work and make sure that the football was being recorded at 5pm, as the poet was stuck in traffic and didn’t want to miss it. (It was.)

When I got back to my desk, I was finally on with ghostwriting gig #5, part 1. I thought it was due in on Friday, but I actually have until next Tuesday. I did the Scrivener binder and tidied up the outline, which means I’m ready to go with a daily target of 4,000 words.

The contract still hasn’t arrived for ghostwriting gig #6, which means I cleared the decks for nothing. (So far.) Hence all of the other stuff I’ve been doing to fill the time.

Here’s how Tuesday went:

moved Reedsy emails to ‘study’ folder
marketing for Night Crawler (see, I even have a technical term for it!)
quick blog catch-up
daily 5-minute email declutter
published Chapter 27 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat on Medium
published Chapter 28 of Night Crawler on Medium
published B is for… Bolton Abbey on Medium
shared links for the Medium stories on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
made the link for Night Crawler free to Facebook friends
added the new stories on Medium to the master index
create Scrivener binder for ghostwriting gig #5
started today’s blog post (592 words)

Words written today = 592

Wednesday

I had all of my ducks in a row and ready to go on Wednesday when two things happened.

First of all, the cat had to go back to the vet. And secondly, the approved outline arrived for ghostwriting gig #5… after I’d already set up the binder with the original outline.

Not a problem, I’ll load the new file into the binder too and compare the text for each chapter to ensure I at least include any extras. The chapters are my breakdown anyway. The outline suggested 16, while I’ve gone with 40.

The cat’s okay too, but she might have developed asthma in her old age. She has steroids for another fortnight and we’ll take it from there. (We were weaning her off the steroids and have bumped them up again.)

By the time I’d gone out, seen the vet, come back and had something to eat, it was afternoon and I was already late with yesterday’s Wednesday writing prompts. I did those first, and then dug up an earlier set to repost on Medium.

I was just about to start the next Medium jobs when I got doorstepped by a couple of home insulation salesmen who could have quite easily been Jehova’s Witnesses. They finally left when I told them they were losing me money.

Once I got the Medium stuff done, I turned to an editing job I hadn’t quite finished. I was waiting for the author to send me her amended file and when it didn’t arrive, I asked if she’d sent it directly to the client.

It turned out that she hadn’t, and she was waiting for me to make the changes. So I did the changes, sent it off, and sent the author another quick email.

I remembered that Draft2Digital support had come back to me with a fix for the paperback publishing, so that was the next thing I had a look at. I created the pdf and printed it off so I could proofread it and make any corrections as I went along.

The last job of the day was uploading the amended outline to Scrivener, and I compared the two.

I think I’ve identified the new material, and I’ve highlighted that in red to make sure I use it. But each chapter has the old version next to the new version within it, so I hope that works.

I added more than 5,000 words to the story, but unfortunately, they don’t count.

Here’s how the day went: