Tuesday 29 September 2026: Sorting things out

The poet was very good yesterday. He managed to get up only a few minutes after his alarm went off. I, however, chose to have a further 45 minutes! It meant I was later getting up than I intended, but only by about 15 or 20 minutes.

He went off to work while I fed the dog, had my dirty cuppa, and put a washload through. By the time I’d finished my cuppa, the washing was ready to go out. (It was a quick wash.) I put some washed crocks away, broke one of our puffin coasters, and played with the dog for a bit.

Once at my desk, I finished writing yesterday’s blog post, chose the image and posted it, remembering why Patreon was usually first on my list of blog posts – it strips out the superfluous formatting that WordPress doesn’t like. This time I had to strip it out myself, bringing back so many memories of when I had to do that all the time.

In future, I may still just paste it into Patreon just to strip out the formatting, as it’s a lot quicker than either me doing it or using the plain text editor in WordPress. I just won’t post it. I thought about posting it to Instagram, but the pictures just don’t look as good as the little cards Patreon makes. Plus, I do feel Instagram should be more for pictures we’ve taken ourselves rather than stock images, but that’s just me. I don’t mind it when others do that.

With the poet back at work, I was the sole dog slave in the house, and boy did he make sure I knew it – the dog, not the poet!

Next on the list was finishing republishing Wordsworth Short #23: The Battle of Killiecrankie on KDP. I couldn’t republish it there last week thanks to Amazon’s new rule of only being able to publish two new books per week. I’ll see how that works when I get back into the rhythm and decide whether or not it’s worth keeping.

Then it was the new story for this week, with a deadline of 1 October. I could take it to the line, but if I finish it sooner, they can have it sooner – or I can let it cool for longer before revising it – and if I don’t finish it on time, I WILL still finish it.

Monday’s task was brainstorming, to see if it was worth the effort, and outlining if I thought it was worth the effort. If it only works as a story starter, great. If it doesn’t, I’ll leave it where it is and move on to the next one next week.

I had to move a few things around in the Scrivener short story master file, such as move the story I finished on Sunday from STORIES IN PROGRESS to STORIES WAITING TO BE PUBLISHED. The one I wrote in July was still in STORIES IN PROGRESS too, so I moved that one down as well.

This week’s story started with a last line I had to write towards, but it’s in first person and most of my short stories are in third person. Maybe I could write it in third person first and then change it to first when it’s done? We’ll see.

I sorted out a couple of issues with Plottr. For example, it wasn’t saving files I’d previously created and I made another new template. I did a quick brainstorm, and I made a quick outline, exporting it to Word (or LibreOffice in my case, but the Word files work just as well), and importing it to Scrivener. Plottr does export to Scrivener but it puts everything into sub folders and I don’t use sub folders for short stories.

I made sure both the new file and the new template were still there on Plottr, and I moved on to the next job on the list.

I started the hard copy edit for the new job I reformatted last week and the week before, which meant moving out of the office and into a comfy chair in the living room. Before I did that, though, I revived my multi-project spreadsheet so I could log how many pages I did per day. I’ve let that go over the past few months and it needs to come back into play as it’s a great motivation tool as well as a good record of what I’ve been doing.

Almost two full Pomodoros later I put it to one side for the day. Considering all the formatting I had to do to it, the book is really well written and very interesting. But I was a bit slow for the amount of work I have to do.

It’s over 107,000 words, which will need something like 22 hours, at least. So I moved some work along from next week to the end of October. If I get stuck in and keep my head down, I could do it in the time now allocated. But then I have to transfer it from page to screen, which can take even longer. So I may be moving another week of work along by the end of this week. I’ll know more by Friday.

The poet was home from work, we’d had something to eat, and it was time to take the dog for a stroll.

Today the plan is more of the same, but I should be writing the first draft of this week’s story, which can be between 500 and 5,000 words, before cracking on with the hard copy edit.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing and Medium.