Wednesday 16 July 2025: It rained!

The day started well again yesterday. Especially when we woke to see it had rained. Yay!

I began the work day with revisiting the diary again and lumping jobs all into as few days as possible rather than scattering them throughout the week. Straight away I felt a huge weight lift.

Once I’d done that, yesterday’s tasks were:

• write and post Tuesday’s blog post
• Story #7 for 12 stories in 12 months
• tomorrow’s blog post

Story #7 included ‘finish brainstorming’ and ‘plan’ and not just the writing. By the end of the day, I’d written the story and was more than 500 words over the target word count. I’ll save a copy of the story as it is, then go in today and cut the overspill. That way I’ll still have both versions.

Today, the first job is to submit the story as we only have a 24-hour window in which to do so. 

Here are the rest of today’s jobs:

• finish writing The Ace of Pentacles
• client edit
• Thursday’s blog post

Gosh, it looks like I have nothing to do all day when I put it that way. But the editing is multi-segments throughout the day and for the rest of the week. 

Future weeks that don’t have any work against them yet consist of the following recurring daily items:

• dirty cuppa
• breakfast
• dinner
• tomorrow’s blog post
• tea

The following recurring weekly items:

• this week’s diary
• Diane’s Gig List
• weekly finances

And the following recurring monthly items:

• Monkey Dust admin (or more than once a month where applicable)
• next month’s finances

The best thing about this was that if I didn’t get it all done in one one-hour slot, that was fine. I still had the rest of the day to work on it. What I had to ensure, though, was that I didn’t fall down any rabbit holes thinking I had all day to do something…

I did throw in an extra 3 jobs yesterday as well:

• create book cover for Deadly Deeds in Morecambe Bay (a Mavis Braithwaite adventure)
• create book cover for Loyal to a Fault (another Mavis Braithwaite adventure)
• create book cover for A Mystery at Horton Edge (a Stevie Beck/Horvale short mystery)

Because, you know, book covers…And that second Mavis story (Story #3 in the series) is my 12 stories in 12 months submission for this month. The first one was an assignment for the 50 murder mystery prompts workshop.

Series characters are great for writing prompts and writing assignments, as most of the character back-work has already been done. This month’s 12 stories in 12 months target word-count is 750 words, though, which is a Wordsworth Flash Fiction length and not a Wordsworth Shorts length. The cover I made for it was a Wordsworth Shorts cover, but as the first version I ended up with was just under 1,300 words, it will probably be a Wordsworth Short.

I’d already done the first Mavis Braithwaite book cover, and now I have 3 I might put them together in a boxed set too. I’ll wait until they’ve been in Words Worth Reading first, though, and then release them as standalones.

Grand-doggy #2 was dropped off at the end of the working day. She’s being picked up again on Thursday, when her humans get back from their Oasis gig in Manchester tonight.

See, I knew these blog posts would be shorter with fewer jobs to get through in a single day…