Wednesday 22 January 2025: A good, solid day

Image by Ron Hoekstra from Pixabay

I managed to get up before the alarm on Tuesday, which was a great start. But I wanted to finish reading a book for review. It’s a re-read because the publisher sent me the next 2 books in the series after I posted my original review. But I wanted to refresh my memory, so I read the first book in the series again.

Actually, it’s not the first book because the author has a reader magnet that she gives away to her newsletter subscribers. The reader magnet is what happened before the first book in the series. I haven’t read it yet, but I did enjoy Book 1 so much that I subscribed to the author’s newsletter.

I suppose that’s one of the ideas of sending out advance review copies, to get new fans. Well, it worked. I do like the characters, but the author does head-hop. Knowing that in advance made the re-read much better for me because I knew what to expect.

I finished the book and found the original review. I’ll post it here again when I get back into the swing of book reviews. I now have 3 in the bag, but 2 of them are re-reads. When I’ve finished another book, I’ll start to post the reviews again, but I might schedule them to post on a Saturday.

Once at my desk, the next job I did was share yesterday’s blog post to BlueSky. I’m not sharing it anywhere else and I’ve removed the auto-post to LinkedIn. The LinkedIn link is forever breaking, so it will mean much less work for me in the long run. LinkedIn doesn’t add any value to my work, so it has to go.

And that was my next job. Another 50 minutes of deleting old posts on LinkedIn. I managed just one year in that Pomodoro. I think there are at least another 5 to go…

It’s interesting, though, as I delete links to old blog posts. I’d forgotten, for example, that I’d started a Publishing Challenge series on the blog, to be published in a book at the end of it. And I’d forgotten that I’d started a Diary of a Novel series too, also to be published in a book at the end of it. Those are 2 complete books just there. All I have to do is refine the weekly/end-of-chapter exercises for readers.

Another series was the Wednesday Writing Prompts. I only do those monthly now, at a push. I did them weekly back in the day. And as they were 3, 4, 5 years ago, those anniversaries will be coming around again. I’ve already started a book on ideas for writers (where to find them and what to do with them – 2 books there that can also be bundled together), so I’m going to schedule in time to plough through those old blog posts to see what can be recycled.

I managed both of those jobs in one Pomodoro. The share didn’t take very long at all, and I came to the end of a year for the declutter and the OCD didn’t want me to start another. So for my first official Pomodoro break, I fed the birds and did my 2 standing exercises, and still had time to spare to make a cup of tea.

Back at my desk, I started today’s blog post. And then I did some work on The Ace of Swords. Yes, I have another novella to write this month, but The Ace of Swords needs to be ready first so I can still publish Words Worth Reading Issue Two in January. Issue 3 will then be in April. That gives me plenty of time to polish The Mystery at Whitehorse Farm.

The Night Crawler serialisation finishes in the April issue, so that means by July I need another full-length novel ready to be serialised. Do you see how I’m using the bookazine to plan and schedule my work? I have one novel that’s almost ready. Catch the Rainbow. I’ve changed the series title to The Rainbow Chronicles, and I’ve changed the family name from Moxon to Rainbow. Catch the Rainbow is Book 6 in the series. I’m writing them backwards, and Hattie’s Hotshots is the next one.

I read through the outline I’d already written for The Ace of Swords, to refresh my memory. Then I went and collected snippets from other stories the main character already appears in. By the time I’d done everything I wanted to yesterday, I had almost 2,000 words of notes, for a 5,000-word story. It was nearly dinner time by now, though. So I broke off.

My dinner break was spent in the reading chair. I’d done my floor exercises while I waited for the kettle to boil and I needed to stretch my back into a different shape. I didn’t want to sit at my desk or a table, so I sat in the reading chair and started the second book in the 3-book series for review.

The hospital rang me up on Monday with a date for my gall bladder operation. I had to check that the poet could (a) take me and pick me up, and (b) be around for a few days afterwards, just in case, and then I called her back. She gave me a 7:30 appointment, but I somehow managed to ask her if that was in the evening…It was in the morning! 😱 I must have conveyed some kind of unspoken horror at the idea, because she offered me 12:30 instead. In the afternoon. Phew! It does, though, mean that I’m in hospital 3 days before my birthday. 😳

My next job, then, was to schedule in the hospital visit and around 14 days recovery time. I decided to take the full fortnight off, regardless of how well I’m doing. It meant I had to decide on the next 2 novellas for the great novella challenge, and I chose 2 that are already outlined. The second one won’t get as much time as the first one, even working at the weekends on it. I’ve made them both 3-act stories, though, around 15,000 words, as I hope those will be easier and quicker to finish. If I finish Book 4 early, then I’ll start Book 5. I’ve decided to have a proper break, so I won’t be publishing blog posts either for the 2 weeks.

Some other news I forgot to mention before. Last Thursday or Friday my publisher sent me an email. That’s the publisher of the 2 chocolate books. They’re going to publish the paperback, at last, of The Life of Richard Cadbury. I don’t know why there was a delay on this, but I do think they missed a right trick publishing it this year and not last year, when it was the 200th anniversary of the company. Perhaps the first book had a lot of traction and they’re building on the back of that.

Anyway, she sent me the cover for approval. It’s the exact same cover I approved back in…2018? So that didn’t take very long. 

I scheduled in the next editing job for this publisher. I’m allocating just 7 items per day. If I go over the 7, then the 2 jobs I’m deleting are regular daily jobs, such as some of the editing slots but mostly the tech declutter slot. 

And that was it. My tea was ready, so I quickly finished today’s post, chose the image, and scheduled it.

4 thoughts on “Wednesday 22 January 2025: A good, solid day

  1. Are you aware of the Rainbow family who farmed near Tredington? The youngest son survived WW1 and courted my great-aunt. Having accepted gifts of all his family silver, she then decided he was too much of a “mummy’s boy” and broke off the engagement. Neither married. He turned up several decades later and taught my grandmother to drive!

    1. No, I’d not heard of them. But I was at school with a Rainbow family. Perhaps they were related. What a lovely story! (And nice to see you here!)

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