I had a late start on Thursday due to working very late into Wednesday night. I finished one of the ghostwriting gigs, though, and by the time I got up on Thursday, payment had been approved and the contract for the next instalment had arrived.
Because I was slogging away at the ghostwriting, and because it was peeing down with rain, I didn’t get to walk home from work on Wednesday. That means that, technically, me and the dog were still at work on Thursday morning and didn’t go home all night.
I decided to stay there, and walk home at the end of the day.
The plan was to maybe take the morning off and go straight into client work in the afternoon. However, the postie put paid to that when she delivered two of my paperbacks. Amazon had put these two slimline volumes into a massive cardboard envelope and the postie couldn’t get it through the letterbox.
As I was up, I decided to stay up. And that meant I was able to do some of my own work after all. So, big thanks to our postie! 🦸♀️✉️
Aside from social stuff, which I mostly did on my phone over breakfast, and blogging, I had two of my own jobs to work on when I finally ‘clocked in’ at my desk (only an hour later than usual, as it happened, despite the 4am finish):
- brainstorm The Ace of Cups
- NaNoWriMo Prep Day 1
I’d already done the brainstorming for the short story, which is the second episode in the short Tarot tales. All I had to do with that was transfer the outline to Scrivener.
I gave myself 2 hours to do it all. But, oh, I was tired. So I made myself a coffee (instant, fairly weak, mostly for the caffeine because I’m not a huge fan), pulled on my big girl pants and got on with it.
The Ace of Cups
For a very long time I was always a longhand writer. Everything I did was in longhand. I was addicted to buying lovely new notebooks. (Still am!) Then two things happened.
- I discovered Scrivener (and fell in love)
- I started ghostwriting
These two things together showed me that not only was I able to compose directly to screen after all, but I could also write much faster if I did so.
For ages and ages I wished Scrivener would hurry up and develop an android app. But when it took them 3 – 4 years just to bring the Windows version up to the same level as the Mac version, I gave up on that pipedream and continued to plot and jot down notes in various notebooks.
Then I discovered something else. Story Plotter.
It’s not quite Scrivener, but it is an android app. I can still jot down ideas and things as they occur to me, as I would in a notebook. But I find I have my phone with me more than I do a notebook, so it makes sense to have the app.
If and when I’ve decided whose story it is or which series it fits in, I can tag the idea(s) and create a full-blown plotline.
Not only that, but once I have my plotline I can then choose to develop the story on my phone and add more characters, images, scenes, chapters, etc. OR… I can email the plotline to myself and upload the file to Scrivener.
It’s a-maze-ing, daah-ling.
I emailed the plot to myself. Then I created a master Scrivener file for all of the short Tarot tales, adding in the details for the four aces for now, including the covers. And I created the binder section for The Ace of Cups, transferring the plotline to the index cards.
At the moment, I have 17 scenes, but one is ‘zoom in’ and another is ‘zoom out’.
One day, in the future, when I find myself twiddling my thumbs… (yeah, right) I’ll update the binder with the existing story, The Ace of Wands. The binder section is already there, I just need to upload the story so they’re all in one place.
The Ace of Cups is the back story for one of the main recurring characters in the Stevie Becks series, so this is also sort-of prep work for NaNo.
NaNoWriMo Prep Day 1
For my NaNoWriMo prep I first of all created a brand-new master binder in Scrivener for all of the Stevie Becks stories. I created a section for book 1 (The Fool) and a section for book 2 (The Magician).
Then I went in and transferred the plotline so far to the section for the book I’m working on for NaNo. (The Fool.)
For this series of books I’m using the Save the Cat methodology. Fortunately, I already had a Save the Cat template in Scrivener, so that saved a lot of time.
I finished this work just as my phone pinged to remind me to go and have a dinner break.
When the poet called me at dinnertime, he reminded me that he’d been unable to share the gig list post on Facebook. So I paused my dinner and went and did that. And, of course, I also started to day’s blog post.
