January round-up

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Picture: Ian Wordsworth

January has not been a great start to 2017 for me, work-wise. I’ve been lazy, unmotivated and easily distracted. I think the biggest problem was I didn’t set myself a total word-count target for the month and, as a result, I’ve written hardly anything.

I have had one book each in from two clients, one to edit and one to proofread. I’ll be finishing both of these today and tomorrow, so January won’t have been a total washout.

The other client I had, I knocked on the head because he was sending me far too much work, wanting it all done NOW, and then forgetting how much he’d agreed to pay for it, trying to renegotiate several weeks after invoices were already overdue.

I have two books of my own I want to start working through, Mardi Gras (which was my 2015 NaNoWriMo project), and Catch the Rainbow (the first draft I finally finished for my 2016 NaNoWriMo project). I haven’t touched either.

I have two books of my own I want to finish writing, Diary of a Scaredy Cat, which has been on the verge of being published for several months now, and Ideas for Writers and What to do with Them, of which readers have been getting sneaky peaks.

And then there is the short story work, which ground to a halt when another previously approachable short fiction market in the UK slammed its doors.

All of these things I should have worked on, and I’ve not worked on one. PLUS, I promised to review fifty-two writers’ guides in fifty-two weeks and I’ve managed two-and-and-a-half.

Therefore, this “January round-up” is fast turning into “plans for February, because I didn’t pull my finger out in January”.

Today I have some serious diary work to do, I have at least one of the client books to finish, and I have today and tomorrow to knock a short story into shape to get it submitted to a still-existing UK fiction market before the end of tomorrow. I also need to re-start my word-count and work-load tracker in Excel.

I’d best crack on … or quack on, courtesy of today’s picture of a duck. 🙂

6 thoughts on “January round-up

  1. Hi Diane, I’ve had the same sort of month myself. I’m writing off the next day until 1 st Feb and starting the year again!

    Interested in your monthly word count idea – do you count all words written across many projects?

    Chris

    1. Yes, I do. Although I have each of the individual projects listed so I can see how I’m doing for each one. It’s all added up at the end of the spreadsheet, and I have a target word-count v. actual word-count so I know to change the target if necessary.

  2. I had a slow start but it picked up. It may be about to slow again! Sounds like the publisher you dropped was a dead loss. Well done. We don’t need clients like that!

    1. Yes, February seems to have taken off with a bang! I hope it doesn’t slow down too much for you. No, we don’t need clients like that. I was furious, and he was taking up all of my time and energy. As they say here in Barnsley, “Sithee bye, cock!” 🙂

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