Friday 27 June 2025: Power failure

So I was busily working away on Thursday, going through the regular jobs on auto-pilot, thinking I had the whole day ahead of me. Which, of course, I did. Just not in the way I thought I did.

First job of the day, after feeding the birds and everything, was yesterday’s blog post. I’ve got into a bad habit just lately of not finishing it the day before in time to schedule it before closing down. I caught up on some reading and some emails. 

I had a play around with my book covers on Canva, trying to find a standard colour palette I like. I don’t know how much time I wasted on that, but I ended up with the colours I already had, so that was a bit of a waste. Especially when I remembered that I’ve started to make the covers in Affinity now. 

Then I had a play around with the diary and the upcoming schedule, trying to fit everything in and trying to decide what could go if I want to just write all day for the next few weeks. Unfortunately, I have 3 client edits in progress now, although I haven’t yet started #3. But the extra weekly admin jobs, to remind me to do things as I go instead of taking several days solid to do something, are pushing me over how many jobs I can realistically get around to in just one day. 

Something will have to give, so I see many more hours in my future of staring at the calendar, wondering what can go and what will have to stay. I’ll just try and do that in downtime. If I get much of that.

I added a new sheet to my power spreadsheet, which itemises all the stories I’ve ever written, shows where they’ve already been published, and include a publishing schedule for the future. The new page was a list of word-lengths, prices, and reading times. This consists of the following definitions:

• flash fiction
• short story
• novelette
• novella
• short novel
• novel
• long novel
• very long novel
• epic novel

I added in the price of an ebook, but the price of paperback, hardback and audio book are still to be determined. I did this to ensure I’m consistently pricing my publications correctly. For the bookazine and non-fiction books, I’ll just use whichever length they fall under and use that for pricing, although I think non-fiction is usually priced a little higher.

I closed that down and started to play around with my new, longhand brainstorming lists. Before, I’d have a look at my deadlines and prompts, then look at future calls for submissions, and then look through my ideas book if nothing sprang immediately to mind. But now I have brainstorming lists to add to the ideas process. 

The gig list popped up on my Facebook, so I shared that. And then I pushed everything else away so I could start work on End of the Rainbow for the day before turning to one of the 3 short stories I have to write.

And then the power went out. 

It’s usually just a blip that lasts a few minutes at most, so I hung around for a bit for it to come back, pushing things around my desk, tidying up bits of paper, putting pens into pots, that kind of thing.

But the power didn’t come back. 

I pulled my notebooks towards me and carried on with the longhand brainstorming for 2 of the short stories and ended up drafting outlines for both. These aren’t fully fleshed out outlines, they’re just the bones of a story to make sure I have something to include in case something doesn’t come all by itself.

Then I realised that the outlines were both for MURDER mystery stories, and I needed one for a CRIME mystery story. So the brainstorming process started again, as the ‘crime’ that had slipped into one of the other stories had turned into a ‘murder’, and I needed a murderless crime for the first assignment.

The power didn’t come back, and that meant I didn’t have internet either as the mobile signal is rubbish in our village. 

I dug my laptop out and kept my fingers crossed that the battery was fully charged. It was. And while I didn’t yet have the latest Scrivener files I’ve been working on this week (backup day is Friday), I was able to grab the previous week’s from the portable hard drive, and I saved 2 of them as ‘emergency short story Scrivener’ and ‘emergency assignments Scrivener’. 

I could have done with an emergency novella Scrivener too, but as I needed the latest version of that to continue working on End of the Rainbow, I decided I had enough to be going on with. I will make an emergency novella Scrivener file too, for other such emergencies. But I didn’t use time for that now. 

I thought that by the time I’d got the laptop set up, the power would come back on. But it didn’t. So I transferred the story bones over for the 2 assignment short stories into the Scrivener structure, and I was able to grab the basic storyline for The Ace of Pentacles, from the previous week’s novella file, as I’d already got that ready and waiting and it’s the back story for the 4^th and final recurring main character in the Stevie Beck stories. 

By now I had 4 stories ‘started’, one in the emergency short story binder and 3 in the emergency assignment binder, although one of those will be moved across to the short story binder as I doubt I’ll be using it for an assignment now.

I had:

• a new Marcie Craig short story outlined, The Show Must Go On
• a new Stevie Beck short story outlined, The Craft of Murder (working title, but if I keep it, that may actually turn into a novella)
• a new short story featuring a new, probably standalone main character
• the short tarot tale, The Ace of Pentacles

I think that’s pretty good considering the circumstances, as I usually faff and fanny around when I can’t get onto my desktop computer. But before I could start work on one of the assignments, as those are both due in on Sunday night, the poet came home from work and we went out to deliver birthday cards, which was a couple of hours round trip with the traffic we got caught up in.

As we were out anyway, we decided to get a takeaway for tea. We found out, via FB, on the way home, that the power had come back on. It had been off for more than 5½ hours, and all I could think about was the frozen food in the freezer that might have turned to soup. Thank goodness our heatwave was last week and not yesterday. 

The day before, one of our mobile networks was down too, for almost the entire day. Nationally. And this morning, as I’m writing this, because I didn’t get around to it yesterday, hundreds of homes in Doncaster are without water. 

What on earth is going on?

Anyway, I have those stories to work on now, plus a hair appointment this afternoon, a gig tomorrow, and a birthday dinner on Sunday. I don’t have a lot of time.

Have a great weekend!