Wow! Here we are, 7 days into the merry month of April and I haven’t even published a regular blog post. Until today. So where has the month so far gone?
Last week I managed the Hello, April post and published it on Wednesday. I lost compete track of all time for the next couple of days, forgot to write a post for Thursday, and only rattled off Friday’s bank holiday post from the phone. Then we had such a busy weekend, I completely forgot to write a bank holiday post for Monday too.
So, boy, do we have some catching up to do.
Last week the only things I actually managed were my morning pages (now renamed daily words), and 2 writing into the dark workshops, weeks 3 and 4. I walked the dog every day and I kept on top of a few household chores, such as emptying the dishwasher and feeding the birds, although I didn’t even do those every day. And I did a bit of finance work.
The rest of the time I was lost in planning, well, planning. Mostly looking for a way to keep track of everything I’m currently planning. I eventually found what called itself a digital planner. It’s not a digital planner, it’s a pdf-builder with something like 10,000 templates you can use or edit (and they are beautiful templates). Only some things can’t be edited, such as hourly time slots can’t be changed into half-hourly time slots, and calendars can’t be changed to start on a Monday if they’re already in a pdf.
There’s a scheduler on there as well but it’s nowhere near as versatile or sophisticated as TickTick or ClickUp or Asana or any of those. The price of the ‘digital’ planner, though, I would have like to pay for one or the other.
But I’m still very happy with TickTick, it still does absolutely everything I want it to (apart from hide weekends on mac and android), and more importantly, it works. I can use it on any platform and I can see and use it offline (it syncs as soon as it finds an internet connection again).
This digital planner can be used offline too in the same way, but I have to be careful to only have one version open at a time or one of them will over-ride the other. Very annoying if I’ve been working on something for several hours. But I think I’ll use it alongside TickTick rather than instead of TickTick. I don’t have the planners on TickTick.
Of course I spent very many hours learning how to use this planner, both on my tablet and on my phone…the idea was to also use it on my desktop, but I saw a message flash up that I would have to pay for an iOS licence as well as an android licence, and I hoped that meant just for hand-held Apple devices, as I know the Apple store charges more commission than the Android store for some things.
It would be a bit of a bummer if I couldn’t use it on the desktop as well, but I was happy to keep it like a portable planner if that was the case.
Every spare hour over the Easter weekend was spent learning how to use the app and creating my first couple of planners. I set up a short story planner, a novel planner and a non-fiction book planner. I set up a daily planner and a book reviews planner. And eventually I set up a publishing planner, to try and make sense of the publishing programme I want to set for myself.
In between all of this faffing and playing, we did other stuff too. On Friday the poet took the dog for a walk while I went and did the weekly shop.
On Saturday, we fired up the campervan and went to a local country park where we did what was billed as a 1-mile walk around a lake, but they forgot the half a mile to and from the lake itself. Back at the van we had a picnic and then we came home.
On Sunday, we did a more local walk, around another lake, that’s just over a mile, driving there in the car. We were back in time to eat at home, and we started our Easter eggs.
On Monday, we were back in the car again and off to Wakefield for a 1.5 mile walk around Newmillerdam lake, but the small town was rammed and we couldn’t park. It was a glorious spring day and we expected more of the same everywhere we went. We tried Pugney’s Country Park next, but we couldn’t park there either. And so we stopped off at the National Trust property Nostell Priory (the house I based the home on for one of my historical characters). It only cost us £5 to park and there was still plenty of room.
The walk around the lake at Nostell was billed as just under a mile, but again, they didn’t include the walk from the car park. We got there in time to eat our midday breakfast, walked down to the lake, around to the house, and back again. This time we had our picnic when we got home.
We were so pleased with the puppy. He is such a pleasure. Rufus was not a good dog in a crowd. He was very shouty, a bit snappy and growly, and we generally had to keep him well away from other dogs. Taking Rufus for a walk in a crowd was so stressful we had to seek out places where nobody else went, or we’d go out on days where the weather was awful.
Alfie is a totally different dog. Yes, he’s still a puppy and he still gets excited, but he actually says hello to other dogs by touching noses or having a sniff, and his shouting is happy, excited barking not an aggressive warning.
Of course Rufus was brain-damaged, he had epilepsy, and he’d been attacked by another dog when he was only a puppy and we don’t really know how that kind of experience affects an animal, truly. He was definitely ‘special’, and this didn’t stop us taking him out on nice long walks. We just had to be careful where we went and if someone else approached us, we had to move to the other side of the road or go in the opposite direction.
But still, if the puppy keeps on keeping on as he has been doing, we’re going to enjoy our walks so much more.
Today, then, is a major reset for me. I skipped a lot of jobs and tasks last week that I just have to work my way through to catch up on. Then I start working backwards from the publishing planner so I know what jobs I need to do when for books and stories I want to publish from September onwards.
Publishing 2 things already planned each month from September takes me into the middle of 2028, and if I work backwards from the first of the September books, I’ll know how long I’ll have to shift the client work from my desk.
The plan includes a rapid-release 5-book series (the Whitehorse Farm novellas), a rapid-release 6-book series (the Stevie Beck novellas/short story collection), a rapid-release continuation of the project management for writers series, of which Books 3 to 5 need writing, the last 2 Diary of… books (Diary of a Cool Cat and Diary of a Tiger), the 3 ideas for writers books (Books 1 and 2 then a boxed set), the first of the Rainbow Chronicles stories (Catch the Rainbow), the next 2 Marcie Craig novels and a boxed set, the final Marcie Craig novel and a short story collection, and the Marcie Craig omnibus…
Phew! Now you see why I needed a publishing plan that works. Most of these books are already written (4 of the Stevie Beck novellas, 4 of 5 Stevie Beck short stories, 2 of the Whitehorse Farm novellas, 4 of 5 Marcie Craig short stories, and the 2 Diary of…books). And that means I can see the gaps and what needs writing still. In between, Words Worth Reading will also be appearing, of which the next issue should still be ready before the end of this month before it takes its 8-month break.
I’d best make a start on making a dent in that client work…
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