It’s pancake day today, one of my favourite days of the year. I love pancakes, but I’ve never, ever been successful at making any. I always end up with either scrambled egg or I throw burnt pancakes away. These aren’t the American pancakes. I’ve never tried to make American pancakes and I’ve hardly ever eaten any. I do like them, but not as much as English pancakes.
English pancakes are like the French crepes. We toss them in the air and catch them, in their frying pans. And in our house, because the poet’s an excellent cook, we have them with sugar and lemon on. I’m really looking forward to our tea tonight.
So, yesterday began on time. It’s so refreshing to know I have the entire week in which to do my work, whether that be writing work, editing work, client work, or admin. And the week started very well.
Of course, the first job I had on Monday, after my dirty cuppa/quiet hour and pet play time in the garden, was yesterday’s blog post, because I hadn’t got around to it on Friday. I dashed it off, chose the image, and posted it everywhere, importing it into Medium last of all.
The next job on my list was this week’s diary. This is pretty much looking at my schedule for this week and last week, moving along anything I didn’t finish last week, and the knock-on effect that has going forward. I did make a momentous decision: I decided to finish work at 6pm rather than 7pm. That will at least give me some time to make a pudding while the poet makes our tea if necessary and at best give me a bit of relaxation time between work and not work.
I generally aim to be at my desk at 10am with an hour for brunch and an hour for afternoon tea. During those hour-long breaks I also do household chores or I read or I play with the animals some more. Ten o’clock in the morning until 7 o’clock at night with 2 hours of breaks gives me a 7-hour day, although I do often work through those breaks. But I don’t need to do a 35-hour week any more, and anyway, I don’t really want to. A 30-hour week is much better, even if 5 of those hours are study hours (or personal development).
So I lost the last hour of every weekday and replaced it with the single, continuous line: ‘FINISH WORK’. We’ll soon see how that’s likely to go.
I was late going into my brunch hour (surprise, surprise) and had less than 30 minutes for that. Right afterwards, I settled down to the first of this week’s study sessions, Week 1 of the depth in action workshop. The ‘homework’ for this one was to read a short story and analyse the opening. We were given the book for free, via a book funnel link, but it’s one I already have, so I didn’t have to go through all of that hassle. I thought I might find time yesterday evening to sit and read it, with rain sounds through headphones if necessary,
Next was this week’s Patreon and Medium premium article work, ‘take one idea’, which follows on from the 40 writing prompts I sourced for January. I had some research to do first, though, because I didn’t know anything about the anniversary I selected. I had my afternoon tea in the middle of this work and I carried on with it until 5:30pm, leaving no time before 6pm to finish the day’s scheduled work, other than today’s blog post.
That’s all right, though, because the job I was going to do is the client job I’m doing all week. It’s a short book and I’m only proofreading it. I’ll just make sure to have a good session on it today to start me off, although I did do the printing on Friday.
Also, the dates work and the ‘take one idea’ work is all going towards a full-length writers’ guide too.
Other jobs on the schedule today include a new short story to write (before I do anything else!), Week 2 of the depth in action workshop, and I want to make a start on the dates work for the March writing prompts.
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
