I was up on time on Friday and managed to do all the regular stuff within the time slots allocated. Reading, housework, dog, dirty cuppa, all of it. In fact, I was ready early for my writing hour at 11am. This slot was the dog walking hour, but it’s far too hot at the moment to take the dog out in the middle of the day, so the walk has been moved to the evening and my writing hour was brought forward by two hours!
We were expecting a furniture delivery between 10am and 2pm, and they contacted me twice to confirm it would actually be with us between 10:30am and 12:30pm. It was a good window in any case, but a 2-hour window was much better than a 4-hour window.
When 10:30am came and went, I thought I’d go and prepare for the writing hour, by opening the correct Scrivener file and making sure the room was cool and airy rather than hot and stuffy. The poet was in the middle of some work and at around 10:45am I went to make my trigger cup of coffee…
Yup, you’ve guessed it. The moment I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, my phone started to ring. They were less than half an hour away which, again, was fantastic, but it did make me think perhaps I should have gone to make my trigger cup of coffee at 10am instead of 10:45am. Then perhaps they would have called to say they’d be here well before my 11am writing hour start.
I went out to unlock the main gate then came back and opened up Scrivener, deciding to start today’s blog post first in the hope that I could try again with the cup of coffee trigger once the delivery people had gone and I could dedicate the next hour to writing my short story. I’d just finished when they pulled up outside, bang on 11am.
By the time they got everything in, or alongside the house, and were off again, it was 11:20am. That gave me 40 minutes of a 50-minute Pomodoro to get over the start hump of this story. At the end of that 40 minutes, I’d written almost 800 words. Yay! But then it was time for breakfast. So I paused the clock, 10 minutes from the end, and had a break. At 1pm, I came back to my desk for the last 10 minutes of that Pomodoro.
At the end of the full 50-minute Pomodoro, I’d written 1,035 words for a story that needs to be 1,500 – 3,500 words long. About a third of the way in, and I’d written the opening third. The cup of coffee trigger worked, as did having the Pomodoro timer ticking away.
I would have loved to write more, but I had proofreading to do. So I updated the 36-project spreadsheet, which is far too many projects when I’m not ghostwriting or writing a novella and a short story every month, but it might be okay if I aim at writing a short story every week. Between now and the end of the year, that’s 22 short stories, plus the 2 extra I want to write next week – 24 stories.
What did I learn? I learned that a single hour may be long enough to write a 1,000-word short story, once I get going, but it isn’t long enough to write a 3,000-word short story. So I rejigged the schedule for the coming days, giving me at least two hours in which to write a complete short story. I still have the revision hour and the proofreading hour per story, but I need more time to write anything longer than 1,000 words.
The next two stories on the list are 1,000 words max and 300 – 5,000 words.
I did stop writing and I did do the proofreading for a couple of hours. When I’d done that, I caught up on my bookkeeping for the financial year 2026-2027 so far and I finally managed a backup. Today’s blog post *should* have been a book review, but I didn’t have time to do that as well, so I just posted today’s blog.
Once he’d finished work the poet put together one of the chests of drawers we’d had delivered, one with five large drawers and five small drawers. It took him a few hours, but once he’d done that, we emptied one of the chests in the bedroom onto the bed, moved the old chest outside, and moved the new chest inside. One down, four more to go (two more chests plus two wardrobes).
Friday was a much better day all round. Fingers cross things continue to finally improve.
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