First of all yesterday I faffed.
I was playing a game on my shiny new tablet. I had promised myself I wouldn’t play a game over breakfast. Instead, I’d read a chapter of my book, A IS FOR ALIBI by Sue Grafton (again). Reading a chapter of a book over breakfast is much easier to step away from that getting sucked into a game…And yet, there I was, playing a game.
I moved to my desk with another request to resurrect my monthly writers’ ideas running around my head. That’s definitely one of my most popular topics on both here and on Medium, and people have told me they’ve even sold work as a result of my suggestions. But they take so long to research and write, I really struggle to justify doing the work.
From researching the dates to finding out the evergreen and topical anniversaries, from coming up with several suggestions of what to do with the ideas once they’ve been written (or how to query them and who to query them to) to choosing one and providing a brainstorm list of suggestions and related suggestions. It all takes a lorra lorra time.
And I had a brain murmur: Why not think way ahead and produce a book? And readers already know what happened then and how deep the rabbit hole was.
I did drag myself away from it all in the end, had something to eat, and then wrote yesterday’s blog post. I started today’s blog post next. And then I turned to the editing job… (whispers) which is almost done…
At the end of the day, I renewed my Plottr, upgrading it from an annual subscription to a single lifetime payment. There was a bit of a blip on the tech side of things, but I got there in the end. I had to check it was working across all devices, of course, and was delighted to see that it was. In the evening, I finished A IS FOR ALIBI and started B IS FOR BURGLAR.
I’m keeping this one short, so I have a chance at catching up again.
Maybe you can set up the book so that it’s training on how people can find/research/think up topics? Along with some evergreen ones, and a dissection of why they’re evergreen? That sounds like a book that would steadily sell.
Yes! That’s it. Or part of it. A section on how and where to start, then what to do with it and where to send it. And then the 2025 topical, evergreen and topical-evergreen ideas. I’m going to schedule in the work AND the faffy cover work!