One of the best things of taking part in something online, preferably without cameras, is that when you’re late you can sneak in the back, hope no one notices, and still be in your dressing gown. I was so carried away with some Probate stuff yesterday morning, that I first forgot to go and get dressed, and then I forgot about the People’s Friend writing hour on Twitter, despite it being in my diary in bold, black ink.
Anyway, I snuck in, joined in with everything so far, and snuck back out again in between replies to get dressed!
I had some more Probate stuff to do. It seems the house is sold, but the funds have not been confirmed, despite the agents and the legal people telling us back in July that they had. Fortunately, I found two confirmation emails in the audit trail of this fact. And I located their complaints procedure… but I’ll keep that one in my arsenal until I need it.
While I was still in an admin mood, I finished all of the planning I didn’t do on Monday, including the spreadsheets I didn’t update. I’ve abandoned one type of spreadsheet as it was getting too fiddly, even though it had spaces for both word count and page count (for writing and revising respectively). Instead, I duplicated the less fiddly word count spreadsheets and made those page count spreadsheets.
Having edits in a spreadsheet allows me to see how many pages I have to edit per day in order to meet my deadline. I liked that feature on the old-style spreadsheet, but you have to go in and change everything every month, which doesn’t really save any time. With the new-style spreadsheet, which I’ve been using for a couple of years anyway, it’s just a straight copy then change the details if they’ve changed.
There’s still a progress chart at the end of both lots, so I can still see what my target was for the month and how close I came just by looking at one sheet.
The big job was downloading epub files for all of my books so they’re in one easy place to upload to Legal Deposit. I have to go in and update my Trello, which isn’t as big a job as I thought it would be as I seem to have last done it right after I published Project Management for Writers: Gate 2, only two books ago.
I added a list to my Trello board to allow for PLR, I updated the master checklist to reflect this, and I added an extra colour-coded label. At some point I need to go in and change the colours of the labels so they all show up in the order in which I do the tasks.
WordPress managed to lose a draft of today’s blog post for some reason. I reloaded the ‘backup on file’ and it was empty. Fortunately, I was able to reopen the post from the dashboard and it hadn’t saved the empty backup over the top. I still had some bits to write again, but at least it was better than having to write it all again at this point.
I started to transfer the missing information onto my books board on Trello, then I fell down a rabbit hole trying to replicate what I learned when I made the cover for the magazine. I’ve chosen the novella I want to write for it, created the cover for the book when it comes out as a standalone (after it’s appeared in the magazine), and I tried to mimic the cover design in Affinity.
I found the same picture I liked on Canva on Pixabay, so chose to use that one and credit it as such. It took me a while to remember how I applied the 3D affect on the titles on the magazine cover. The Affinity file wouldn’t let me edit it, so I think I did something that merged it all together as one image or something. So I had to replicate it.
The Probate people came back to me with their excuses, but it was too late and I was too tired to continue the discussion. So I carried on transferring more book information to Trello so in future I can just copy and paste the ISBN and the publication date over, and I called it a day.
Sounds like a fiddly day where it doesn’t feel like a lot got done, but it actually did.
I have to stop following that rabbit down those holes… Or at least schedule time in to follow it.