Friday 20 Jan 2023: Promising myself a treat once I finish…

I spent a lot of time on Wednesday faffing with Trello when I should have been ghostwriting. By about 11pm, I realised I still had too much work to do on the ghostwriting to work through the night, so I fired off an email with a new ETA and finished the chapter I was working on at midnight. I forgot to schedule yesterday’s blog post, though, and had to do it from the phone over breakfast, along with my usual social media fix.

Yesterday, for the ghostwriting, I’d just about finished refreshing my memory by reading the last chapter I wrote and was ready to crack on when the telephone engineer arrived and, without warning, he disconnected my broadband. Now, I don’t need the broadband to do the actual work, but I do if I’m in the middle of some fact-checking research, and I do when I’m updating my schedule.

Once I knew there was no internet it was like a massive blockage, and I started to faff on other things instead. I couldn’t really settle into the work in any case because the telephone engineer needed attention and when he went off in search of the cabinet, he said he would only be a few minutes and I thought he’d be knocking at the door again at any moment.

Well, he was gone for a good hour and when I realised he wasn’t coming back any time soon, I made myself something to eat and took a break from, erm, taking a break. When he got back, it turned out that the fault wasn’t in the cabinet, a few hundred metres away, but at the exchange, 6 or 7 miles away. But he fixed it and that was the main thing.

The poet called me three times too in that time, on the mobile. They cancelled band practice Thursday evening, and band practice night is usually takeaway night, so he dropped into the supermarket instead. (When there’s no band practice, takeaway night is Friday.)

His first call was to let me know he was on his way home from a distant site, his second call was to let me know band practice was cancelled and to give me plenty of time to decide what he could get for tea, and the third call was him asking me if I’d made my mind up yet. Having only just eaten dinner, tea was a long way off my mind.

I went back to the ghostwriting and finally managed to add some words. I try to write a chapter, take a break and do something else, refresh my memory on the last thing I wrote, and write the next chapter. The biggest problem was, though, that the chapter I needed to work on next required a number of poems. So first I had to go and find out which poems were popular in 1814 and which ones had known authors, then I had to find some in the public domain, then I had to choose and reference the ones I decided to use. That took a lot of time. A lot.

Then I discovered that I can download some of the books I need from Project Gutenberg… and I had to physically drag myself away, once I’d downloaded two books for this current gig. I promised myself I could look at it as a treat for finishing the current job…

I limped to the end of the chapter, by which time it was tea time. Really? A whole day to write one chapter? At least I was over the hump, and I got back to work after tea.

The kickstarter I backed has done so well there was not only one bonus stretch reward but two, and they met all of them. So for an initial pledge of $30, I’ll get nine books and eight pop-up writing workshops, all about writing fantasy. The workshops alone are worth $1,200 (plus UK tax, so $1,440). That’s approximately £971 (£1,165 with tax). For $30? (Apx. £25.) It’s a no-brainer.

After a second night on the trot I was ready for a good and proper lie-in. Thank goodness I only have easy jobs to do today.

Have a fab weekend!

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