Diane Wordsworth: freelance writer ● novelist ● editor ● ghostwriter ● book reviewer ● member of the CWA ● world-famous nutter-magnet
Never in my life have I been a morning person. And I’m still not. I have much respect for people who can get up at 7am, or 6am, or 5am, or anything earlier than 10am really. It doesn’t come easily to me at all. I wouldn’t mind if I stayed up at the other end of the day to make up for it. But I like to be back in bed by 10:30 – 11:00pm at the latest. My dad […]
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(Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay) Part of my getting back to a structured routine includes writing up my writing diary as I go along. So I’m back to reporting on what I did ‘yesterday’ or how ‘yesterday’ went. Monday 11 October 2021 Monday started off quite well with the new regime, although I was running about 15 minutes late right up to the morning coffee break. ‘My’ work I walked to work and spent the first hour checking emails and […]
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(Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay) I had such a rubbish day on Monday that I had to try much harder on Tuesday, not only for my own personal mental wellbeing, but also for my clients’ benefits. I need to stop getting so behind with my work. I worked until about 6pm, so there was no slacking there. My work So, what did I manage in the end? This was my list: write today’s blog post ✅ import today’s blog post to Medium¹ […]
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(Image by Melk Hagelslag from Pixabay) Monday is usually such a good day that I was disappointed when work stalled yesterday. It was my own fault. I disappeared down another one of those pesky rabbit holes and when I came back, nothing had changed. I stuck with what I already had. I was looking at project management software because when I duplicated a project in Asana, it duplicated everything and I had to go in and retype everything anyway. I can make a […]
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(Image by congerdesign from Pixabay) The tags for this cover picture today included the word ‘breakfast’. I’ve been looking at the ‘breakfast’, and I think it’s a slice of bread (or toast), with sliced banana on and topped off with chocolate flakes. Dark chocolate flakes. 🤢 Who has that for breakfast? 🤔 The weekend I worked very hard on Friday to get the last part of ghostwriting (1) Book 6 in, and I actually managed it during the day, and while it was still […]
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(Image by Kelvin Stuttard from Pixabay) My rates for editing and proofreading have been static for a lot of years now. And when I started the ghostwriting a year ago, I went in low but towards the top of what I already knew the client paid. After all, I was learning the trade rather than an expert in it. Since then he’s given me a pay rise. With all other prices going through the roof now, the time has come for me to […]
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(Image by webvilla from Pixabay) I lost half a day on Monday, when it should have been my first day back, due to taking the dog to the vet. It knocked me off kilter a bit for the rest of the day, but I was still busy. I was busy setting up the subscription form for the blog posts from Substack. (In case you didn’t see that, it’s in the sidebar too – or at the bottom on mobile devices – and there’s […]
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(Image: The poet shooting High Force waterfall in Teesdale © Diane Wordsworth) Holiday! It was a bit of a mad rush in the end, but I submitted the last of my work a week ago last Friday. Okay, so it was really late. But it was gone by the time the weekend arrived. On the Saturday, after a bit of a lie-in, we did the holiday shopping and on Saturday night the poet’s band had a gig. On Sunday we […]
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I’m a bit demob happy this week, as we break up for a week’s holiday on Friday (first holiday in more than two years!). I’ve also been feeling a bit demotivated. I think the two may be connected, and it might be why I try not to get too excited too soon too often about things. However, I suppose I haven’t had a bad couple of days. Tuesday 24 August 2021 I did it again. For two days on the […]
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Monday’s are always good… but then everything usually goes downhill from there! Monday 23 August 2021 Considering I didn’t stop work all weekend and I finished very late on Saturday and late-ish on Sunday, I was up surprisingly early and at my desk by 10am. I had a lot to do, though, but only a handful of things for myself before the client work kicked in. My first job was to share yesterday’s blog post to Substack, the old site […]
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(Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay) Friday 20 August 2021 Friday was one of those busy days where you don’t stop all day but by the end of it you don’t know what you’ve done. You have nothing to show for it. I deleted the paid-for newsletter on substack (not the free one) because by the time I’d filled it with about 50% of the material for the first issue, I was getting a warning that it was too long. Apparently, there […]
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(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay) (I love this artist’s work!) Not a rabbit hole this time, but it does feel as though the week has vanished down a dark hole! Anyway, look at this! I’m creating my first regular blog post on the new site and I didn’t have to make sure I selected ‘classic’ from the menu first. That’s not going to take as long getting used to as it did remembering to choose it before. Thank you […]
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(Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay) Tuesday 10 August 2021 The day did not start as late as I thought it would, but it did start later than I would like. These last-minute writing marathons have to stop. They’re simply not sustainable. Of course, it’s my own fault. I should just do my work when it’s scheduled instead of faffing. Overnight, the ghostwriting instalment that I submitted was approved for payment and the contract arrived for Book 5 Part 4. This […]
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 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 moreImage by alan9187 from Pixabay I worked until 10pm gone on Friday, but I did it. As usual. I wrote my 11,000+ words, checked it over as I finished each chapter, and sent it off. By the time I surfaced on Saturday, payment had been approved and the next instalment contracted. Honestly, if I did that every day, apart from having to be peeled up from the floor I’d have a completed novel every … week! Obviously, though, that’s unsustainable, […]
Read moreMay might be a 31-day month, but with a bank holiday at either end and with me sticking to not working at the weekend, that gives me only 19 work days. If I finish all of the writing that I have planned, both mine and the client’s, then the target word-count for May is 75,500 words. That’s just under 4,000 words per day. (gulp!) But … I can do that. I just need to stick to the three writing projects […]
Read moreImage by Alexander Stein from Pixabay I had a lovely Easter break, something I planned on due to being so busy again just recently. I even finished work at a respectable time on Thursday in order to enjoy the full weekend. Saying that, I did have my first Covid jab on Friday, and fortunately the only side effects I seem to have suffered happened at about 4am on Saturday morning. That left us free to have some leisure time, and […]
Read moreImage by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay … three to go. Yup, the poet had the first of his two vaccinations at the weekend. His booking had got lost in the ether, somehow, but they saw him anyway, which was very good of them. Mine’s on Friday. We didn’t manage as much as we would like on Saturday. First of all we had the weekly shopping to do, and on the way there we also stopped off to have a look at […]
Read more(Image by Please Don’t sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay) This week seems to be dashing by in a bit of a blur … For my first job on Monday, I caught up with diary work and scheduled the week ahead. An addition this week was proofreading in from Hong Kong that arrived first thing Monday morning. I wrote and scheduled a couple of quick blog posts, and then it was back to work. The rest of the day […]
Read moreFor a long time I have maintained a home office. For a while this was in the corner of another room, but I’ve been known to build stud-partitions in a bedroom to keep the office space separate. I don’t believe in having my work space in the same space as my home space. I think it breeds the habit of never switching off. If I can close the door to my office, that’s even better. So whenever I can, I have […]
Read moreI didn’t have a great start to the week due to a rough night on Sunday and a long lie-in on Monday. However, I did manage to get some things done. Monday One of the things I wanted to do was see if there was any other editing or proofreading work coming up. I checked the job board, and of the 5 jobs I selected, 4 had already hired and one wanted a Canadian/American English speaker only. I can do […]
Read moreImage by 🎄Merry Christmas 🎄 from Pixabay Apologies for going AWOL for a few days. I’ve been plodding along, working steadily, and then by the end of each day, I’ve realised I haven’t blogged yet – usually right after switching everything off. We had the entire weekend off. The only errand I had to run was to the supermarket, and I had to go on my own due to Tesco ramping up their social distancing rules. It’s probably just as […]
Read morePhoto by freestocks on Unsplash Yesterday was a long day, but despite not managing any writing, it was a productive day all the same. Ghostwriting The ghostwriting revisions took much longer than I would like, and as I’m not paid for that part of the job, I need to reduce the possibility of it happening again. Speaking of payment, payment for the first instalment landed in my bank account yesterday, so that was very nice. The changes I made to […]
Read moreImage by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay I had a good day on Tuesday, I finished the pdf edits for the proofreading job and sent that back to the client. By return, she asked for my invoice, which I sent, also by return. The next job should have been editing, but I was distracted. While I was amending the pdf, my computer kept on juddering so that my manual (freehand) “pencil marks”, aka ticks, were wavy at best. Something was running […]
Read moreImage by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay I had a slow and steady day yesterday. I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to, but I did get through quite a lot of stuff anyway. I had dinner at my desk, and I finished work at about 6pm. Just in time for tea. Proofreading I finished the hard-copy proofreading job for England. (Yay!) I do enjoy these books, but they do all result in a massive Yay! when I’ve finished. The entire […]
Read moreFriday was a very, very busy day. The biggest job was the ghostwriting gig, as the first instalment needed to be in by the end of the day. However, I like to take a bit of a break in between chapters, and so I alternated between writing and proofreading. The other big job was the proofreading job. I also had in an editing job. There was no firm deadline on the proofreading job and no deadline at all on the […]
Read moreI was very happy when we got up on Thursday morning to see that the snow I’d ordered, and had been promised, for about the past 3 weeks, had finally arrived. It looked very lovely, and it continued to snow for the rest of the day. I’ve had a good and solid working week, plodding away at the various projects. Every day I’ve been able to work on everything except for The Beast Within. Any down-time I’ve had has been spent researching […]
Read moreImage by Michael Drummond from Pixabay When I was learning how to write, fiction and non-fiction, I was taught to always ensure that my facts were correct, as there will always be someone who knows, and there will always be someone who complains if there’s a mistake. When I was training to be a broadcast journalist, I was taught to always check any facts or historical details to ensure that they were correct. I’ve been writing for a long time, […]
Read moreImage by Robert Balog from Pixabay On Saturday we popped to one of our local parks to partake in our daily (dog) exercise. It’s a newish park that has a lovely walk around a massive lake. We knew it would be busy, but we didn’t think there would be a load of idiots there too. When we arrived, it was a job in itself to get from the car to the path, as it was very icy. And when we […]
Read moreImage by Tomasz Proszek from Pixabay We were promised snow on Friday. Heavy snow. All day. We woke up and it wasn’t even raining. To say I was disappointed was an understatement. I was looking forward to walking the dog in the snow. Before closing everything down on Thursday, an editing job came in from the India client. It had actually been on the job board since teatime the day before. I’d been checking the job board every morning but […]
Read moreImage by Susanne Jutzeler, suju-foto from Pixabay Yesterday we awoke to a beautiful frosty day. When I got up to let the dog out first thing, I glanced out across the fields at the back of our house to see a ground-hugging mist. By the time we made it to the breakfast table, the mist had lifted and the fields were white over. I could see someone walking their dog and I actually thought to myself, we should be walking the […]
Read moreI had a much better day yesterday. 10-project planner Once I’d written yesterday’s blog, which was 1,293 words before I even started anything else, I moved on to my 10-project planner to add in all the projects I’m working on first. These are: ghostwriting gig (63,000 words in total, 40,000 for January) The Beast Within (80,000 words in total, 10,000 for January) proofreading job (252 pages in total for January) 12 short stories in 12 months (1 story in total […]
Read moreHappy New Year to everyone! Let’s hope we kick this virus in 2021, so that life can return to normal. I had a lovely long Christmas holiday, almost three whole weeks in the end. And while we were still very busy, I also did quite a lot of navel-gazing. I’ve been cogitating over the way I structure my working day. It is clear that I’m at my most productive and creative in the mornings, and I’ve tried to work on […]
Read moreImage by Gerhard G. from Pixabay So I’ve been spending the past few days planning for the new year. I did very well this year in that I was able to complete all of my outstanding work in good time to take the whole of the Christmas period off, for a change. But that, of course, left me with a gaping January with no income, as everyone was due to pay me before today (and they have). And so I […]
Read more… diversify. Looking back at 2020, a lot of us have seen major changes. I think lockdown was the biggest challenge for many. For people like me, who work from home and hardly see anyone from one day to the next, lockdown wasn’t that big a deal. I had the poet home with me while he was furloughed, and since furlough ended, he’s been encouraged to work from home whenever possible. And that’s been really nice. At our old house, […]
Read moreI’m starting to run out of pictures from our Hatfield Moor trip, so we’ll have to go out again and get some more. Fortunately, we have the last of our long weekends for the year coming up. If the weather is as sunny as it is today, the poet might finally get the autumn colours he’s after. I finished the ghostwriting gig. I took it to the wire, with the bonus short story. But the actual novel was delivered the […]
Read moreI had a bit of a strange experience yesterday. I’m admin on a Facebook group, the Seriously Serious Scribes, and last week I set off two new daily threads for October. All was working well, until on Sunday, I was seeing notifications for one of the threads, but I couldn’t see the thread. I checked again yesterday morning, and sure enough, there it was gone. My friend tagged me in the thread I was looking for, and I saw the […]
Read moreI don’t have any pictures to hand today, and I don’t have time to sort one out. So here’s one courtesy of Pixabay. Today I am not a happy bunny as WordPress have finally taken the classic editor off the WP admin posts page. Perhaps it’s an October thing. It’s not all bad, as there’s a classic editor “block” now. But I have yet to discover how to position pictures where I want them to be and not where they want […]
Read moreThe River Torne is a river the poet used to fish when ‘e worra lad (when he was a young man). In those days, the lads used to wait until the river had been dredged, usually around September time, and the reeds and weeds removed from the edges. Apparently, that was the best time to fish. We went to look at the River Torne a couple of weeks ago to see if it was a viable venue for him now […]
Read moreI managed to hit my desk by 9am yesterday morning, so that’s something. We’ll ignore the fact that I then went to get dressed … At least the garden wasn’t swarming with work people by the time I was ready to start work … ha! Famous last words … I’m trying to share some pictures from our new surroundings. If they have anything to do with the blog post, all well and good. But often, they don’t. They’re just decoration. […]
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