Following Tuesdays shenanigans and rabbit holes, I made sure I didn’t look at anything yesterday anywhere until I had some work in the bag. I set a Pomodoro, determined to finish that writing plan/book dump, and ended up doing 2 Pomodoros. And not only did I get it done, I also titivated it to suit my own working plan *and* I added an extra string: My Power Board. And then I stepped away from it, leaving it open in the background to consult.
When the poet called from Ireland, he said the rain had stopped long enough for him to walk to the factory from the hotel. He also said it was apparently on its way over to us. Sure enough, an hour later, here it was. It wasn’t too bad. Just a lot of rain and bit windy. But nothing like what we’ve seen recently.
While I was working, the rain stopped and the birds appeared in the garden. The hanging feeders were full and there was plenty of food on the bird table. But no, they wanted their food in the ground feeder. And the ground feeder was empty. I fed them and added bird seed to this week’s shopping list. By the time I got back to my desk, they were munching happily from the ground feeder.
When I finished working with the brain dump on Plottr for the day, I did a weekly tech scan and started today’s blog post. When the scan had finished, I backed up the Plottr work to Word, then ran a regular but long overdue critical data backup. The backup always takes a long time and it gets longer every time I do it. One day I need to go in and remove the older duplicates.
So I could claim I’d done some work, I settled down to check those extra pages for the nasty editing job. These 24 pages are supposed to replace the 24 pages I already edited that were ignored and discarded, and I was assured they were better than the original. In actual fact, they were identical. So I had to go through them all again, making the exact same markups that I did before. Then I transferred the markups to the pdf.
This job has far exceeded initial expectations and scheduling and I told the client that I don’t want to see it again unless they pay for the extra time on top of the first lot of extra time I already invoiced them for. They did pay it then, but they recharged the author. Which is great, but can also give the author licence to make changes ad infinitum. “I’m paying for it, therefore I can.”
I worked for three hours on this job. Then I had an email exchange with the client about the next job on the list, and an email exchange with Plottr support over a few questions I had. I sent the editing job back to the client via WeTransfer, and called it a day. It was only 5:50pm when I finished, so not a bad end to the day.
And hey! I did some work!
Excellent work day, although the editing job sounds awful.
May I ask what a “Power Board” is?
Currently it’s what I’m using the whiteboard for. I have headings across the top: percolating, brainstorming, planning, writing, typing, cooling, revising, proofreading and publishing. And I have 4 rows: short stories, novellas, novels and non-fiction. Then on Post-it notes I have the title of the thing I’m working on in marker pen, and any information written on in biro, and the Post-its sit where they are in the work-flow.
There’s a picture of it here: https://www.dianewordsworth.com/2023/06/05/monday-5-june-2023-the-power-board-this-week/
Thank you!