Wednesday 18 June 2025: Wallowing

After a really late night on Sunday I had an extra hour in bed on Monday, which put me an hour behind on the rest of the day too.

I fed and watered the garden birds first then settled down to carry on reading one of my short crime stories while I had my dirty cuppa. About a third of the way through, I got bored of that and moved into the office.

The email acknowledgement came through that my assignment had landed safely. And then I came up with about a million things I wished I’d done instead, and a million and one ways of rearranging what I had sent.

While I caught up on social media and stuff, I fired up Week 5 of the classic mystery writing workshop and watched and listened to that. If I do an online jigsaw, the lesson seems to sink in more and I know when to stop and take notes and when to rewind if I didn’t quite grasp something. This week’s modules were mostly about private eye mysteries, which is handy when I’ve just brainstormed a brand-new private investigator main character.

I finished yesterday’s blog post and scheduled it. Then started today’s. I did Friday and the weekend for yesterday, so today’s is Monday and Tuesday. I tidied up my Instagram by deleting posts more than a year old. Then I tidied up my Scrivener short story master file.

I alternated between staring at the file for Christmas at Whitehorse Farm and the file for this month’s 12 stories in 12 months for a bit, wondering how to get started on both, and ended up wasting most of the 2-hour session I’d allocated twiddling my thumbs or gazing at my belly button.

Rather than have nothing to show for my time, I put them both away and pulled out End of the Rainbow instead, and worked on that for a while. It’s flowing so well at the moment, and I could do with it being finished for the next bookazine, so I can start serialising the entire book (currently in 3 parts for the great novella challenge).

And I made an executive decision. I moved Christmas at Whitehorse Farm to next month, and brought End of the Rainbow forward to this month. Such is the flexibility of working freelance. If something hasn’t percolated sufficiently just yet, if there are no pressing deadlines, just swap it with something that’s screaming to be written.

Yes, I’m attending the Christmas cosy novella workshop during the month of June, but there’s nothing stopping me getting all of the pre-writing out of the way first and then working on the entire thing in July. The course leader for this one only plans an Act/Part at a time before writing said Act/Part, rather than planning the whole thing up front. I’ve tried doing that, and it really slows me down.

I’ve tried writing by the seat of my pants, but there’s too much chaos then for me. I think I need at least a bullet outline of the entire story before I start drilling down into the detail. But there’s nothing stopping me writing a bullet outline for the novella and then working on the detail an Act/Part at a time. I can develop characters as I go, and I don’t mind going in a different direction to the one I’ve mapped out if that works. But the barest of outlines is a bit of a life-belt for me, in case I get stuck and start to panic.

On Tuesday, I slept in. I was really, really tired still after Sunday’s late night working, but I still hadn’t done any catching up. So when the poet got up early and went off over the Pennines to Manchester again, I moved my alarm on an hour.

When I woke up, the first thing I did was check to see if there was a response to the assignment I’d submitted on Sunday. He’d acknowledged it on Sunday night (his time), but the next lot of videos was due to be posted on Tuesday, along with the response to the assignments. He doesn’t go into detail on the videos, but he does comment if he noticed the same things among the assignments.

I’d put a lot of work into that story, including a lot of depth, following the depth workshops I’ve been revising. I thought he’d probably hate the story, he’s quite blunt when it comes to what he thinks, which I don’t mind. But I did hope he’d at least recognise the amount of work I’d put into the depth part in particular and that I hadn’t gone OTT.

Well, he didn’t like the story. He LOVED it. He said he got hooked in with the ‘great detail’, right from the start, and he wished me luck with it with readers. 😲😳🥳

Wow!

And so I wallowed in the glory of that for at least the next hour. 🤣 But when I went to see if the next lot of videos were up yet, they weren’t. So I had to find something else to do first thing.

I eventually made it to my desk where I watched Week 6 of the classic mystery writing workshop. I wallowed some more. I updated today’s blog so far. I checked to see if the 50 murder mystery prompts videos were up yet. They still weren’t. And then I hauled out End of the Rainbow to spend some time on that.

Then I had to get going on the 12 stories in 12 months story, as the deadline for that is today. I rattled something off as quickly as I could and left it to cool for a bit before going back to it. It was strange going back to a shorter story and having to leave out all of that depth.

I finished the story and left it to cool overnight, and called it a day.

The magic bakery

A few years ago I stumbled across a book called The Magic Bakery by Dean Wesley Smith. Originally written in 2017, this book turned on a lightbulb inside my head and enabled me to see copyright in a whole different glow.

One of the first things I did, after reading this book, was start my own magic bakery. And in one 12-month period, I published around 56 books: short stories; collections; novellas; novels; and non-fiction books. Fifty-six of ‘em. I’ve added to them since, but those books now provide me with a steady trickle of income. Passive income.

Well, the magic bakery is back, but this time Smith is updating it, chapter by chapter, first on his website, then in a class, and then in a new and updated book. Here’s chapter five.

I’ll carry on linking to the chapters, as they appear, so that you guys have some understanding of what I’m banging on about when I persist in talking about my magic bakery. And I’ll repeat this bit of blurb every time for first-time readers.

For those of you who’d rather read them as Smith posts them himself, rather than when I get around to it, you can go straight to his website here.