Diane Wordsworth: freelance writer ● novelist ● editor ● ghostwriter ● book reviewer ● member of the CWA ● world-famous nutter-magnet
With me falling quite a way behind, I finally managed to crack on with some NaNo, hopefully in time to rescue the situation. On Friday, Day 26, I had just under 18,000 words to go, which gave me 5 days at 3,600 words per day. I wrote 3,667 words (35,842). 35,842/50,000 words. 72% done! I also had ghostwriting to do and the plan was to work at the weekend. Saturday was very busy, though, and I didn’t get around to […]
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Day 25, I think. And I can’t say Days 19 – 25, because I only seem to have done something yesterday, which was Day 25. So I’ll just claim that one. On Wednesday I submitted the final part of Ghostwriting (1) gig Book 7, and before the day was over, the client was asking if I could start a new story yet. I told him I could start on Monday, and he sent over the next storyline and some tentative […]
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After struggling to get up for several days on the trot, I was finally at my desk by 10am yesterday, with all social media stuff done. I started the next book on my reading list for November, having finished the first one the day before. And I created a new project on Asana for reading. I decided on December’s four books to read and created a new Instagram poster for that, and I updated the Asana project with book cover […]
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Day 9 of NaNoWriMo was another day I went off down a rabbit hole. I’ve been trying to organise my reading, and so this time I was looking for a spreadsheet that collected stats and created nice, pretty charts without me having to learn how to make and position them. Of course, the main aim was to keep a record of the books I’m reading and why I’m reading them. I wouldn’t want to spend time on a book in […]
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This post was going to be a ‘weekend off’ post and it was going to post yesterday. Then I remembered that I also had a publication day post for yesterday, so the weekend off post was added to the NaNoWriMo Day 8 post. Day 5 Day 5, or Friday was supposed to be a day off for me. I was supposed to have a holiday with the poet, but I had a ghostwriting deadline. So I reported to my desk […]
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I’m in the exciting first few stages of writing and am already at almost 8,000 words after only three days. I hope I can keep the momentum and the rhythm going. I wrote 2,515 words on Day 3. 7,795/50,000 words. 16% done! In other work, I started renegotiating an existing contract. I came close to terminating the contract but the client was really nice and convinced me to have another think. So I am. Because I knew I wouldn’t be […]
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I worked at the weekend – again – but only so that I could at least have 2 days off this week with the poet. He had to go on another business trip first thing Wednesday morning, so I made sure I had Monday and Tuesday with him. On Monday we chilled for a bit before we went out and did a bit of spontaneous shopping. On Tuesday, he worked on the gig list, a playlist for a private party […]
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… but then, Mondays are always a good start. I just struggle for the rest of the week after that. I should have been having a holiday yesterday and today, as the poet is using up his annual leave before he loses it at the end of the year. I had too much work to do, though. And so I worked yesterday and I’ll work today. However, I’m not going mad. Walking to work works at 9am much better than […]
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(Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay) On Friday and all over the weekend I worked on the novella Mardi Gras. The plan was to split it into two and either serialise it in Words Worth Reading or make two separate stories out of it. I trimmed it down from around 49,000 words to around 43,000 words and decided to keep it all intact. It was added to Words Worth Reading in its entirety. This means that Words Worth Reading is currently sitting at just under 70,000 words. […]
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Thursday 26 August 2021 I had a lot to do on Thursday, so I was happy when I made it to my desk at a reasonable time again. I started by having a quick look at the short stories I’ve written but done nothing with for possible inclusion in the fiction magazine… It soon became clear that there was a reason I didn’t do anything with them. They were all rubbish. So that was that, then. Next up I selected […]
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(Image by Angela Huang from Pixabay) Thursday 12 August 2021 Thursday disappeared down another rabbit hole and I didn’t get a lot done, quite frankly. In fact, I don’t think I did a single thing. I was okay with it, though, because, if you remember, I’ve built in all of this wiggle room. However, I don’t really want to keep pushing things along just because I’ve got wiggle room. It defeats the object a bit. Fortunately, the poet has come to […]
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(Image by Pexels from Pixabay) On Friday the rain came (again), and along with it a few thunderstorms. So some of my time was spent watching either the storm through the window or pigeons and blackbirds cavorting in the puddles. With a weekend of storms forecast, we decided to spend it at home, apart from Monkey Dust’s gig on Friday night. And I spread my Friday work out, moving some of it to the weekend after all. Friday First job […]
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(Asana screenshot in calendar view) This week I needed to concentrate on catching up with the ghostwriting work. Right after having one writing marathon and submitting it, I was straight into another, and that isn’t sustainable. Also, if one step was delayed in any way, it pushed the rest along too. So I took the week off blogging, Medium, my own writing and self-publishing and tried to come up with a system that will work. I did allow myself an […]
Read moreFriday Very late on Thursday night, my short story New Year’s Revolution was published in Illumination on Medium. When the postie called at about 11am, she brought me a competition prize… a purple collar with a bell on for the cat. I couldn’t help but wonder what my third piece of good luck would be before the weekend… Anyway… first thing Friday, after my daily handwriting Pomodoro, I went in and updated all of my links for the short story […]
Read moreImage by Monoar Rahman Rony from Pixabay Thursday I was still eating breakfast on Thursday morning when a text notified me that the plumber would be with us in 20 minutes to fix a faulty valve. Twenty minutes. So I quickly finished eating and got dressed and he arrived at the door at about the same time I arrived downstairs again. This cut short my first handwriting Pomodoro and I didn’t manage as many words as I have been. He […]
Read moreImage by dexmac from Pixabay Monday I had a very late start on Monday and for the umpteenth time I vowed to take the next day after a ghostwriting marathon and submission off. Unfortunately, I had another deadline only three days later (Wednesday), and I couldn’t take it off this time. Maybe next time… So, yesterday, the gig list opened back up after more than a year off. And so did Monkey Dust. When I finally reached my desk, this […]
Read morePhoto by Wendy Wei from Pexels Friday Despite being a bit behind on the ghostwriting, I still did my own stuff on Friday morning. I wrote a blog post for here, I posted Chapter 3 of Project Management for Writers: Gate 1, and I grabbed and prepared Chapters 4 to 8 so I had them ready for this week. I top and tail each chapter so it can just be pasted and formatted on a daily basis. I’m posting this one on weekdays only […]
Read moreSo I’m not doing brilliantly, but at least I’m doing. In other words, I’m not sat navel-gazing or twiddling my thumbs. Tuesday seems such a long time ago, I can hardly remember what I was so busy doing. Thank goodness for the diary! Tuesday The plan, of course, was to do some ghostwriting. But it was Tuesday on Twitter and that meant #TuesdayNews. I always share any of these #TuesdayNews Tweets when I see them, but I never have anything […]
Read moreImage by Comfreak from Pixabay The plan was to have a weekend off and maybe catch up with some reading or sewing. I did manage to read a few chapters of a book I want to review soon, but I didn’t do any sewing. Walking However, on Saturday, after we’d done the shopping – early for a change – we did finally manage our first walk since the new year. It’s still very busy in the village, and we’re still […]
Read moreImage by Monoar Rahman Rony from Pixabay I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again, but Thursdays really are quite tired days. Mind you, I may have still been catching up after my 4am finish the other night. However, when the dog woke me up yesterday morning, I was very happy to see that it was almost 7am. I went through and checked all the usual stuff before arriving at my desk – email, Facebook, Twitter – […]
Read moreImage by John Conde from Pixabay Friday morning dawned bright and sunny after the storms of the previous couple of days. The working day began with some Monkey Dust admin and half an hour of date work – July is finished and the Monkey Dust diary is filling up nicely. Next up was the cosy mystery ghostwriting. This is a very long chapter, but I did get a bit carried away with the time. That is good, yes? After dinner, […]
Read moreImage by ElisaRiva from Pixabay I’ve been a bit preoccupied this week. Not navel-gazing or anything like that. Just trying to sort everything in my head into some sort of workable order. It’s been a bit chaotic in there of late. Mostly I’ve been working on the new book series. It was very much in the inspiration stage at the beginning of the week, but I think it’s smoothed out into something workable by now. At the start of the […]
Read more… Christmas! Friday turned out to be busier than I initially expected. I had to step away from the Canva and get on with some work, or I’d be doing it all weekend. Blog planning I started some blog planning work, both for this year and for next. I saved the templates I want to use for the whole year, but I also had a bit of a doodle for the rest of this month. We both actually break up […]
Read moreA couple of weeks ago we went in search of Bawtry Forest. Apparently, once upon a time, the poet camped there when he was doing part of his Duke of Edinburgh award. Although we found the forest, we couldn’t find anywhere to park. And we ended up on what we’re sure is a private road as it ran through the middle of a massive pig farm. The pigs looked well, though. As we drove around, we did stumble upon a […]
Read moreSo I’ve been reading this series about making money from home (Make Money from Home series by Sally Miller), and I’m finding it very interesting and informative. I’m trying a few things out that they suggest, and one of those is creating a logo. But do you need a logo? I’d never, ever thought about having my own logo, for the blog, for the website, for social media. I’ve had Facebook since about 2008, I’ve been blogging since 2005, and […]
Read moreI didn’t get a lot of my own work done on Friday. In fact, I didn’t get any of my own work done on Friday. I was finishing a client edit that needed to be back by teatime as I didn’t want to be working on it until 11 o’clock on a Friday night. So as soon as I was up and at my desk. I got on with that. I totally forgot that I was supposed to be content […]
Read moreYesterday was another successful day of two halves. Once again, the morning was spent doing admin and chores. I did my daily job search but didn’t fancy any. They’re all far too poorly paid at the moment – $100 to edit a book of 125,000 words? I don’t think so. It would take me 25 hours just to read that, solid, let alone edit it. First of all, double the time. Then that $100 needs at least another zero on the […]
Read moreFriday seems like such a long time ago now. I was very busy and forgot to write and schedule a post for this morning. The morning was spent doing all of my admin jobs and household chores again. I did my daily job search and pitched for one job and I pitched for an extra assignment to do today. The rest of the day was spent with Richard Cadbury. I had a reading session, a writing session and another reading […]
Read moreI thought I was just tired and overdoing things a bit, but an upset stomach turned into full-blown flu symptoms. Before I started to feel poorly, I tidied up a short story, Pippa & Davey Forever, and sent it off, and I prepared another partial for Night Crawler and sent that off. I cleared the copywriting job, I sent my apologies to the writers’ group, and I asked the publisher of the Cadbury book for an extension. And then I […]
Read moreFriday morning began with some Pomodoro admin and a jigging about of each one, resulting in one Pomodoro less per day and a shorter dinner break, but longer Pomodoro breaks. I certainly didn’t feel quite so rushed by the end of the day and had more time to breathe. I wrote my daily blog post, tidied up my Twitter feed, was approved for two more NetGalley books, and did some work on the Cadbury book. In the afternoon, I scheduled […]
Read moreWow! What a wild weekend we had … well, it was busy. And interesting. Friday morning I had my first 25 minutes on social media, and I wrote a blog post. A Sky delivery that was supposed to arrive between 10:30am and 11:30am finally arrived at midday, with no apology from the driver. I had a hair appointment at 12:30pm, so didn’t have a lot of time to do much else. In the afternoon, I did my 14 Days … exercise. The […]
Read moreMy first 25 minutes yesterday were spent looking at houses. We’re not planning on moving any time soon, but I do like to keep an eye on the market and I needed to clear a load of sold properties out of my RightMove account. The next 25 minutes were spent on my social media morning fix. A new proofreading job came in yesterday morning, but there’s no rush. I had told him I could probably get it back to him […]
Read moreYesterday was a very good day. It’s as though Tuesday is the new Monday. I’ve always been more enthusiastic and productive on a Monday and then it’s generally all downhill from there. But now Monday afternoons are taken up, all of that has changed. I started the morning with just one Pomodoro (25 minutes) on social media, running down Facebook and Twitter, hiding the stories I’d seen, muting the retweets I don’t really want to see, and I had a […]
Read moreFriday was a good day, although I was still faffing with Scrivener as it was a new reinstall. I’d learnt a lot of things during the outage the previous day and I wanted to apply some of what I’d learnt. I did my 14 Days … exercise and rebooted my Pomodoro Tomato. During the morning I wrote a new blog post, and I wrote some new material for The Fool. During the afternoon, I contacted the new client and I wrote another […]
Read moreI was supposed to drop by a week ago last Friday for an update, especially as we were taking the bank holiday week off. But I was so busy, by the time I remembered, it was already past our bedtime. And then, well … and then I had a week off. I left you with news of a visit to Birmingham regarding the Richard Cadbury book. I had a great day. It was lovely to meet his great-granddaughter. We had […]
Read moreI’ve had a bit of a busy week where my own work has suffered – and some of my clients’ work. But I’m sorting a few things with my dad’s estate that have finally come to fruition (it’s only taken a year …), and I’m amazed at how complicated it all is and how unhelpful some folk can be. It’s in hand, though, so I can get back to work. I wasn’t completely idle, however. On Friday 26 July, I […]
Read moreMuch of Friday was spent finishing the client edit, and I did, and I submitted it, and he cleared payment. It will be in my bank on Wednesday. How cool is that? I read two more chapters of the NetGalley book, and I wrote a blog post. And that was Friday. We had a fairly busy weekend. On Saturday, during the day, we finalised the video for the latest alphabet adventure and I wrote the blog post up direct to screen. […]
Read moreIt’s great being able to turn up to work wearing whatever you like. Yesterday it was shorts and t-shirt again before I had to “get dressed” to go out. The first hour of the day was spent reading three chapters of the NetGalley book. I also did a tiny bit of gig list admin (shared this week’s gig list and then scheduled a post asking for next week’s gigs). I remembered to start my Pomodoro tomato and I spent the […]
Read moreWe had a fantastic three weeks off work. We went camping for only two of them, but we were determined to have a break from everything else as well, and so we stayed away from everything for three whole weeks. We certainly needed it. When we arrived in Welsh Wales for the first leg of our trip, we had to put the tent up in a semi-gale. It wasn’t put up properly, or completely, and a lot of stuff was […]
Read moreOh my goodness. Was it really 5 February when I last posted about my (new) fat year? I think it’s fair to say I’ve been having a bit of a … hiatus. (Keep reading!) We were doing really well on the high-fibre diet. We were eating at meal times only – mostly – and feeling fuller for longer with less of a need to snack. Our clothes were fitting better. And we were starting to get some more energy. I […]
Read moreI didn’t get very much work done on the novel at the weekend as we did shopping and gardening on Saturday, the poet had a gig Saturday night, and we were out all day Sunday, walking. Saying that, I did start work on the characters on Saturday morning, writing 85 words. This was mostly writing an alphabetic list and filling in character names to make sure I didn’t have too many starting with the same letter or sounding too similar. […]
Read moreWe finally caught up on “I is for …” yesterday, for the alphabet adventurers. It’s been a long time coming – 6 months since our last outing – and, boy, could we tell. It was already a struggle getting up, as the poet’s band had a gig the previous evening, and that usually means a late night. We could have quite happily stayed in bed, catching up on missed sleep. However, we forced ourselves to get up, pack a picnic, […]
Read moreWe had planned on visiting my mom at the weekend, but the country was battered by storms last Thursday, and most of Saturday was spent rebuilding the greenhouse. I’d already spent time on Thursday and on Friday looking for bits that had blown off. But we live on the edge of a cornfield opposite a farm with livery next to open land, and at least one panel from the greenhouse may be lost for ever. It has a roof now, […]
Read moreWe had a very busy weekend with Monkey Dust playing both Friday and Saturday evenings. Two very late nights on the trot automatically mean two very late lie-ins the next day too. I also had a massive proofreading job I wanted to finish, and I ended up finishing it at the gig on Saturday evening so that we could drop it in by hand on the way home. Plus, we needed to do our weekly shopping and we took MiL […]
Read moreOops-a-daisy! I seem to have had another inadvertent day off. I’m not beating myself up about it, though. I’m currently very busy and next week is looking busier. And anyway, I’m not really lagging behind either. Yesterday was spent arranging two new assignments for next week that involve (shock! horror!) leaving the house! 😱 There’s also not a lot I can say at this stage either, as it’s quite confidential. 🤫 But the two appointments will take me out of the house for most […]
Read moreThe plan always was to work yesterday, and take today off as my first day off. Then the plan changed because the weather was supposed to be nicest yesterday. We were going to go out for the day. Then that plan changed as well and we decided to stay in. However, I decided to keep it as my day off and work today instead, negotiating this with the poet, who naturally agreed. I did nip onto the NaNo website to […]
Read moreI had a lot to do again last week, and I didn’t manage to do them all. daily writing exercise write a blog post every day I only managed one of each of these last week, and they were both on Wednesday. Saying that, I’ve done both already today, but it’s unlikely I’ll get any more blog posts done this week. read through Catch the Rainbow and send next instalment to beta readers sort out all the bits for The Beast Within (a Marcie […]
Read moreI’m a bit late with this, this week, but I have been busy, just not necessarily busy doing what I was supposed to be doing … I did some work on Saturday last week, at the front end of the week not the tail end. Here is how I did for the rest of the week to last Friday: write to family member for a foreword for the history book Yes! I wrote him a letter telling him he could […]
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