Friday 6 Jan 2023: lurgy house

While tea cooked on Wednesday night, I sat down and caught up with the rest of the daily competitions that had built up over the previous few weeks. That meant that from Thursday, it should only take 10 – 15 minutes each time, leaving another 35 minutes to fit in the online workshop videos. This, in turn, gives me a whole pomodoro in which to fit something else.

The poet came back from the midlands with a throat infection and because he’d been munching pills and lozenges all the way home, he was feeling a bit sick by the time he got here and didn’t feel like going to bed yet. So we binge-watched series 2 of Happy Valley, starting it earlier so that we could go to bed earlier than we did the other night. We don’t know yet if it’s regular tonsillitis or the current Strep strain that’s going around. What we do know is that it isn’t Covid.

With the snot monster still firmly in residence with me, it feels like we’re in the lurgy house at the moment and we need a big red cross painting on the door.

Because of the late-ish night, and because I was up coughing in the night and the dog had me up twice, it was another late start.

Pomodoro 1

Before he went back to bed for a few hours, the poet had a few video meetings for work, and the third one was with his colleague who’s a bit of a whizz on Excel. When they had finished their meeting, I hopped on to ask her about my formula quandary. She came up with the answer straight away so when the meeting finished I tried out her suggestion. It worked in the most part but I was still getting a SPILL error, which I think might be because that particular cell I’m trying to point to has another formula in it.

I put it to one side to have a play with later, once I have some words to add to the word-counts with a view of sending both worksheets off to her via the poet if I still can’t get it to work.

Then I literally spent only minutes, ten at the most, doing Thursday’s competitions. That left plenty of time to watch the next batch of motivational Monday videos. Topics this time included:

• how to recover after a fall
• how much time to take recovering
• how to catch yourself

I fitted three things into the first pomodoro of the day, took my break, made a cup of tea, and started…

Pomodoro 2 & 3

The next two pomodoros were entirely dedicated to Catch the Rainbow. I finished Scene 3.3 and I came up with a log line. Then I wrote Scene 4, which was very, very short, and Scene 5.1. I’m compiling the story in Word each time I complete a scene and saving it in scene complete number order so that I have an audit trail and in case something happens and anything is lost.

I wrote 1,216 words.

Pomodoro 4 & 5

For my fourth and fiftth pomodoros of the day I switched to Project Management for Writers: Gate 2, writing the last two chapters, compiling to Word and then sending to the poet for his input.

These last two chapters required a bit more work than Catch the Rainbow and will probably need more work when they get to the editing stage. They were certainly more of a struggle than I thought they would be. I kept on putting them off until I couldn’t justify putting it off any more. At least I have them down now, though, and I added 2,264 words to this draft, of which the current final total is 39,593 words.

That’s my first completed book for 2023, even though I did start it in 2022.

Pomodoro 6

For Pomodoro 6, I took the dog for his twilight trot. By the time we got back, I was out of energy and I didn’t get around to any client work. I finished off this blog post and scheduled it, then called it a day.

Summary of the week

This first week of 2023, or Tuesday to Thursday at least (as I post a day behind), has been spent experimenting with pomodoros and time slots and seeing how much work I can get through if I only put my mind to it, knuckle down and get on with it. I’ll use this information going forward when planning further working weeks.

For now, though, to round up, I did achieve the following:

• watched motivational videos every day (PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT)
• caught up on daily competitions (FAFF)
• wrote 1 book review and posted it everywhere (CLIENT WORK)
• wrote 3 further blog posts (ADMIN)
• started to read a new book for NetGalley (CLIENT WORK)
• retyped/rewrote 5 scenes for Catch the Rainbow (EDITING)
• started Part 2 for GW1 Book 12 (CLIENT WORK)
• returned some books to a publisher’s warehouse in Barnsley (CLIENT WORK)
• finished Project Management for Writers: Gate 2 (NON-FICTION BOOK)

All that in only 4 days and while fighting a cold. It’s been interesting.

Today

I have another batch of motivational Monday videos to watch and more of Catch the Rainbow to rewrite. I have a lot of admin work to do (date work, year planning, weekly backup, etc). I’d also like to get through a bit more client work today so I’m not rushing to do it all next week.

Have a great weekend!