After a lovely long weekend we were back at it yesterday, albeit with another late start. I made it to my desk at about 11am after catching up on social media. That meant I was just in time to catch the writing hour with the folk at The People’s Friend. It’s rare that I arrive on Twitter on time to join in and I try to join in whenever I do make it.
Once that was over, the only job I seem to have got around to yesterday was the writing prompts. And I don’t just mean yesterday’s writing prompts. I also revived my Substack and started with a generic dates article in general and then scheduled the old prompts for May for today. Ideally I want to also add June, July and August. And then, of course, will be yesterday’s September ideas. Once the first one was published, I shared the link on social media.
I opened up Word and started a new file for another writers’ guide, Writers’ Ideas: Where to find them and What to do with them. Then I made it Part 1, Writers’ Ideas: Where to find them.
I had to write up yesterday’s blog post first and then tack the prompts onto the bottom. Because there were so many this week, it took much longer than usual. In future I think I’m going to just ‘throwaway’ a maximum of 25 ideas. It’s a time-consuming job and it had already taken so long this time that I feel as though I skimped a bit on the ‘take one idea’ part.
Once I was happy with the 34 initial ideas and the extras, taking just one as a starting point, I shared it on Medium and on Vocal, where it was accepted by both within minutes, the Vocal community auto-accepting it. I hadn’t even got around to updating my record of submissions spreadsheet, so I finished that as well. And then I shared the Medium and Vocal links on social media.
But it had taken ALL day. I did a tiny bit of admin for the gig list, I did another tiny bit of admin for the current editing job, and I did a quick search of the jobs board saving two to consider later. And then I called it a day. The poet had started tea and it smelled very nice.
Because I hardly touched yesterday’s to-do list, today’s is even bigger. This is what it looks like at the start of play today:
- Monkey Dust admin
- Revisit Autumn Fayre (short story)
- Brainstorm The Long, Unending Day (short story)
- Draft 1 The Long, Unending Day
- Electronic edit history book
- Medium
- Vocal
- Job Search
- Competitions
- Surveys
- Blog Post
- New month wordcount and multi-project spreadsheets
For Medium and Vocal I want to sort out another short story to publish with them. I should have done the band admin yesterday and I should have started to brainstorm The Long, Unending Day.
Looking at that list, I think I’m just going to plod through it and tick things off as I go.
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Yup, that’s a lot. Hit one thing at a time, and you’ll get it done.
I plodded through, did most of it, moved some of it and abandoned one of it.