I’m a bit demob happy this week, as we break up for a week’s holiday on Friday (first holiday in more than two years!).
I’ve also been feeling a bit demotivated. I think the two may be connected, and it might be why I try not to get too excited too soon too often about things.
However, I suppose I haven’t had a bad couple of days.
Tuesday 24 August 2021
I did it again. For two days on the trot I made it to my desk by 10am. If it happens again, I could get worried…
The first of my own jobs this morning was this week’s Wednesday writing prompts. Because I missed a week again last week (workload v bad time management), it was another flat list.
When I was happy with what I had for here, I copied it over to Substack, did the formatting, and scheduled them both. (429 words)
Substack
The original idea for Substack was so that readers could have my blog posts delivered direct to their inboxes as though they were following the blog. I couldn’t find any way to make following the blog easy, so I started the Substack newsletter.
Now if you want to follow the blog, you can do so in two ways.
- Once you start to leave a comment, a check box appears beneath it asking if you want an email every time there’s a new blog post.
- There’s a funky new widget in the sidebar (it’s at the bottom on mobile devices) (but it appears you need to be registered with WordPress to use it…).
If you prefer to subscribe to the blog and have already subscribed via Substack, do feel free to cancel your subscription to the latter. Otherwise you’ll get bombarded twice!
I actually like Substack, though. I like the cleanness of it and the ease with which it can be shared. Auto-posting to social media would be great, but until I work out how to do that too, I’m just going to share them as they’re published. Or soon afterwards.
Now that readers can subscribe to this blog, I was toying with winding Substack down as a daily blog and making it a proper newsletter. But as I think that newsletters and email lists might be in my future, it’s more likely that I’ll keep Substack as it is.
For now, I’ve renamed the newsletter ‘Diane Wordsworth’s blogletter‘. And it’s free to subscribe to.
Back to Tuesday
I found another potential outlet for my work, probably fiction, and I’m watching that for a few days. I’m also thinking about that fiction-writing schedule I want to reboot.
The next job of mine was starting today’s blog post. (625 words)
And that was it. I’d allocated 90 minutes to my own work, and within 90 minutes it was done. Then it was over to client work.
I’m on ghostwriting Book 5 Part 4 this week, but before I could crack on with that I needed to write the blurb. I’m not a blurb writer, but I do feel that this client likes too much information in theirs, and they build it in as an intro. But, I had a go and sent it off. (399 words)
I paused for an early dinner. Then I sat and stared at a blank screen for a bit.
Unfortunately, I had a really bad case of the don’t wannas (as my buddy Devon says), and I had to go and feed the birds or just do something different so that when I got back to my desk I might feel a bit more like doing it again. Even the poet got a quick phone call from me.
I do enjoy the ghostwriting, I really do. But as I’ve only been doing that now for so many weeks on the trot, it’s starting to get a bit old. I need to be back on my own stuff again. But really, I just need to work out a proper balance.
However, I have another deadline looming as well as the holiday coming up. I don’t want to be working on this one at 4am on Sunday morning.
So, I made myself a cup of tea, gave myself a kick up the bum, and tried again. I got going again not long before 4pm, and I decided to just aim at at least a chapter at a time, of which I had three-and-a-bit to write on Tuesday.
As soon as the poet arrived home I found my first wind and began to type. Within half-an-hour I’d at least finished the ‘bit’. (1,001 words)
Hopefully, Wednesday would be better.
Total words written today = 2,454
Wednesday 25 August 2021
I knew it would be too good to last. After a pretty vocal night from the cat (she’s old, we think she’s dreaming or going a bit senile), I slept in and the dog woke me up shouting instead. I hit my desk at 11am. That’s an hour later than I’d like.
My first job was reformatting a short story and submitting it to a publication on Medium. Then I prepped the next one on the list, for next week, and chose a picture to illustrate it.
I made the change to Substack and edited the ‘what is’, and then I started to update today’s blog post. (706 words)
Two rabbit holes appeared: One to find out how to change the text to a red that I like, because the custom colours keep disappearing. The other was to quickly titivate the article I drafted last week for Medium and then submit it.
And by then it was dinner time.
I read a few chapters of my current NetGalley book, jiggled around with my diary for the rest of the week, and advised ghostwriting client #1 that Book 5 Part 4 would be with him by Friday.
Book 6 Part 4 is due in on Monday 13 September, but I’ve scheduled that to finish on Friday 10 September. Then I updated my Asana with both lots. I expect Book 7 Part 1 to start on Monday 13 September, but the contract hasn’t been updated yet.
The contract came in from ghostwriting client #2, so I accepted that, sent it back, and let him know that I break up on Friday for a week. (This job doesn’t start until 13 September.) I won’t add that to Asana yet until I know how the work is going to come in.
Hopefully that will be enough client work for a few weeks to keep me ticking over so I can start catching up on my own work again. But I’m half-expecting Hong Kong to appear in September too, all being well, as that’s an academic job.
And then I made a cup of tea and did an hour of proofreading for the Yorkshire client. Well, a 50-minute Pomodoro. I only cleared 24 pages, but at least it was a start and, again, I need this one gone by the end of Friday this week.
I’d started the ghostwriting when notification came in the The Bonfire Party had been published on Medium, and immediately afterwards, so had How to Calculate your Hourly Rate. So then I shared the links and added them to my master index.
I carried on with the ghostwriting, but when I went to save it as I went along, I suddenly got an error message. My working memory stick was full! Oh no!
So then I started to move a load of stuff over to the humongous external hard drive, and by the time that had finished, it was 9:30pm and I’d had enough. I’d managed 1,025 words. 😟 (1,025 words)
Total words written today = 1,732
This leaves me with a lot of work to do today and tomorrow.
Over to you!
Everybody: Do you prefer to see to-do and tick-lists or do you prefer to see more of a report like this one?
Substack subscribers: Are you happy with daily blog posts landing in your inbox, or would you prefer to see them less often?
Answers via the comments section. Ta. 🙂
