
I had another late start yesterday but I woke up with a determination to start working on at least one of my novels very soon. I can read and read and read the how-to books until I go cross-eyed, and I can watch a gazillion tutorials until they all blend into one. But none of this is actually getting the novel writing done. And I really, really want to get the novel writing done.
So, you’d think I’d go straight in to writing one of the novels. After all, I have so many planned, most of which have been planned for years. But instead of that I wrote yesterday’s blog post and writing prompts. The blog post doesn’t take very long at all, but the writing prompts do. Well, not the prompts themselves, but the suggestions for how to take one idea and write something around it.
Don’t forget, I have to choose the illustration too and correctly caption it, and then I have to come up with a decent amount of spin-off ideas for just one of the main ideas. I provided 24 main ideas and 16 spin-offs from one of them. This takes a lot of work and that’s why I also stick it behind a paywall if I can.
It took me a while, but I got there and I submitted it to Vocal (accepted almost instantly), and then I submitted it to Medium, thinking I’d likely be waiting a while to have it accepted there as the publication I’d chosen is quite inundated – although not as inundated as the one I sent a story to last week and am still yet to have an acknowledgement. Then I topped and tailed a short story that Vocal accepted on Monday straight away and I sent it to the publication on Medium that we all know currently has a backlog of work.
After a great deal of thought, I then decided that Vocal and Medium, and here of course, are the only places I want to post work in future. None of the others are paying off, so I went into Ko-fi first and removed everything from there, and then I went onto Substack and removed all but two stories from there. I don’t have another version of these 2 stories, so I’ll copy and paste them from Substack. I’m going to close these down soon and I think I’m also going to remove everything from Post.News and close that one down too. I like CounterSocial, though, so I’ll keep that one.
In between all of this, my internet kept falling over. I use Opera, and there was an update earlier in the week and it’s not been right since. Now I don’t know if it’s Opera or if it’s our internet service that’s the problem, but I had to keep coming over to Google Chrome, which isn’t my favourite, just to finish things I’d already started. Like this blog post. Then I had to remove all of the old bookmarks and replace them with new, and go in and change my address details for the auto-complete on forms I use all the time (competitions, for example). So that took time too.
I caught up on a few competitions where the closing date was imminent, and then tea was ready. So I didn’t get any writing done at all.
Today needs to be better.
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Don’t sell yourself short. You got A LOT of writig done. It just wasn’t on the novel. That’s the thing of it — we have to keep doing all these other bits and pieces that support the time we want/need for the novel. You’re doing great! I’m using Post to drive traffic to other sites, not for original content. It drives back the most traffic to the Substack, I found. When I expand the Substack into fiction, later this year, it will be interesting to see the contrast between the traffic on the fiction and on the nonfiction.
I’m closing down a few of them as they’re just not working for me but are taking up valuable time.
I keep forgetting I’m writing 10,000 words per week just on the ghostwriting, so thank you!
I’ve had too many of those days where I didn’t think I was doing any writing because I wasn’t working on the novel. But Devon is right. You WERE doing a lot of writing!
I hardly ever get time to work on my own stuff. It does get me down sometimes.