That was the week that was

One of the current works in progress.

This week I’ve tried to do a bit of my own work in the mornings and client work in the afternoons. I kept on being distracted by colourful sparkly things, though, and it became a bit of a chore to drag my attention away from that and back to the job in hand.

Monday was mostly faffing with book covers and flyers and other PR and marketing material. I gave the blog a facelift, and I wrote a blog post and had a bit of a rant.

Tuesday morning I wrote another chapter of Project Management for Writers, Book 1. I rebooted the alphabet adventurers and did my diary for the week (yes, I was late doing this), leaving most of Monday blank and writing in the jobs I did on Tuesday as I did them. And I wrote two blog posts, scheduling one of them for Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning, after writing and scheduling a blog post for Thursday, I concentrated on the outline for The Beast Within. I managed to get distracted by a couple of blog posts this time, and off I went to read them, forcing myself to come back to my own desk once again.

The good news here is that I finally completed the detailed outline for The Beast Within. The middle part is still a bit vague, but there’s a lot of possibilities listed so I at least have something to play with. It’s all already in Scrivener, so I don’t have to transfer it to there, and it’s already in the format of a full and detailed synopsis, so I don’t have to worry about that one either.

The Beast Within made it a long way down my project management board on Wednesday, and now, I believe, it’s ready to continue writing. How exciting!

I still have the blurb to finish, which I might move towards the end of the project, and, looking at my project management whiteboard, it’s clear that I also have a bit of a bottleneck at the top of the fourth lot of steps, the actual writing part.

At the time of writing this, there are three projects at the write #1 stage. Saying that, though, one of them is well into the third and final Act, one of them is six chapters in, and only one is at the very top of the write part, aka the beginning.

Speaking of blurbs, the ghostwriting client made an unusual request for the blurb for the current work ahead of completion. Now, this is my most difficult aspect of any writing job, and I struggle to do it when the story is complete. To do it ahead of completion was even more challenging.

I did it, though, and so far it hasn’t bounced back for revision. Fingers crossed it was what they were looking for.

The other thing I had to do on Wednesday was continue sorting out Twee Tales Twee at Amazon. They’d somehow linked volume 1 (Twee Tales) with volume 3 (Twee Tales Twee) so that vol 1 disappeared from my Kindle shelf on my author page. Then, when they unlinked them again, vol 3 vanished.

By Thursday, it seemed to be sorted, but I will keep an eye on things.

Despite being quite busy, I had a huge distraction on Thursday. The cat went AWOL. Now, I know that cats go AWOL all the time and often come home when they’re ready. But this was Holly’s first all-day disappearance, and she usually comes when she’s called.

I had the neighbours and some other villagers looking out for her, we went for a walk and the poet went for two drives. But there was no sign of her.

She did turn up eventually, looking very clean, as though she had nothing more to do all day than wash herself. She was also very hungry. I think that she was locked in somewhere, like a garage perhaps. The poet thinks she simply wandered too far and got a bit lost.

This morning, she nipped out briefly, and now she’s where she usually is: asleep on my office windowsill.

Today, I have a lot of catching up to do – story of my life! We also want to do the shopping that we should have done on Thursday night, but we didn’t want to leave the house until the cat was safely home.

I might be working at the weekend, or we might manage to get out for another walk. Whatever you’re doing, have a good one!