Tag: The Beast Within

3 December 2020

Jobs are like buses

So my book is still “temporarily out of stock” on Amazon, both here in the UK and in the US. That’s very odd for a book they’ve had on pre-order for weeks. They’re billing it for release in January 2021 in the States … Hmm. The Beast Within I struggled a bit yesterday with The Beast Within, not least because I...

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2 December 2020

Progress

Monday went by in a bit of a whirl. In case you didn’t notice, my book The Life of Richard Cadbury was finally published. There then followed a frenzy of marketing activity that mostly consisted of creating flyers and mockups in Canva and Photopea respectively. Then I went through Facebook, Twitter and MeWe and added links and images to all the...

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27 November 2020

The Beast Within

Because I didn’t get very much done on The Beast Within for NaNoWriMo in the end, I determined to add it to the planner for the last month of this year. So I sat down and counted how many writing days I have between now and when we break up (13 after today), and I decided to aim for around...

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19 November 2020

Breathe a little

I’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...

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10 November 2020

NaNoWriMo: Day 5

So it’s Day 5 for me for NaNoWriMo, despite it being 10 November. It isn’t going great at the moment, I will admit. This is because after I spent time creating my Scrivener binder last week, I had a change of heart and a change of structure, and had to go in and change it all. The binder is in...

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3 November 2020

NaNoWriMo: Day 1 of 17

Yesterday, then, was the start of my NaNoWriMo journey for 2020. I have around 17 days in which to write 50,000 words, and that gives me a daily target of just under 3,000 words – or a smidge under 2,972. If I can write at least those 3,000 words every working day, that will give me 51,000 words. For ages...

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2 November 2020

NaNoWriMo Prep: Day 5

My NaNoWriMo for 2020 starts today. I’m still having weekends off, and I’m still having some long weekends with the poet. This means that my daily target is just under 3,000 words. I’ll also be a (working) day behind on the blog.  So today’s blog, for example, is where I was at by the end of the last working day....

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29 October 2020

NaNoWriMo Prep: Days 2, 3 & 4

I’ve been working through the prep days for NaNoWriMo, trying to do everything in a certain order. Because I’ve decided on The Beast Within, much of the character work is already done, and the book is semi-outlined all the way through. So I’ve just been reading through all of that to refresh my memory, and adding anything else that’s popped into...

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27 October 2020

NaNoWriMo: And the winner is …

Today should have been NaNoWriMo Prep: Day 2. But after a long weekend, and with NaNoWriMo looming only this weekend, I had quite a lot of admin work to do. First of all I had to tidy up my online calendar. I had to mark as done all of my usual jobs and chores for the whole of October, as I’ve...

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22 October 2020

NaNoWriMo Prep: Day 1

NaNoWriMo would not be the same without the participant badge and every year, in case you hadn’t noticed, I do like to display said badge. So, here it is. I really like this year’s. I like the colours. The other imagery that I like to do for NaNo is to create a book cover. NaNo gives you a feature for...

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11 August 2020

I published a book

I didn’t get around to writing any of Catch the Rainbow yesterday, but I did sort some of the rest of the material into some sort of order. This one may not get finished before the end of August, but then again, it might … The Life of Richard Cadbury was also neglected. I need to get on with this one....

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30 June 2020

And the winner is …

… Catch the Rainbow! I thought long and hard, I considered my current workload, and I decided that I don’t have the physical capacity at the moment to write something completely from scratch. That meant that three possibilities were automatically eliminated: The Beast Within, The Fool and Whitehorse Farm. This left Diary of a Pussycat (a writers’ guide), Mardi Gras and Catch the...

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29 June 2020

Decision time

The time has come (the walrus said) to make a decision. The picture above is the short list of works in progress I’m considering working on next. One of these projects will be completed during July for Camp NaNoWriMo. But which one …? From top left and going clockwise, the projects are: Catch the Rainbow, the prequel to Night Crawler; The Fool, a...

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23 June 2020

I too should be writing …

I’m really getting the itch to be writing again. I keep booking it in, but then I keep running out of time. I have clients that all have deadlines. And I manage to meet all of their deadlines. To the extent that the work keeps on rolling in – but I’m not complaining about that. I’m complaining about my own...

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6 November 2019

I’ve been having a play …

… because, like, I’m really, really busy. Everybody else seems perfectly able to use Canva for promotional material, but I didn’t even know where to start. And when another one ended up on my newsfeed in Facebook, I just had to have a go. I found a step-by-step idiot guide and took it from there. And here are two I...

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2 October 2019

Wednesday 2 October 2019

October suddenly got busier late yesterday afternoon. But it’s okay, I was half-expecting it.  It’s the new writing job I was in discussion about towards the end of last week. And it’s only 10,000 words max. I can do this … Yesterday started with me writing up the day’s Pomodoros, as I hadn’t had chance to do them the day...

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25 September 2019

Wednesday 25 September 2019

Over breakfast yesterday, I finished the NetGalley book I was reading and I wrote up today’s Pomodoros. That meant the first job at my desk was a 500-word blog post and my daily warm-up. The next thing I did was write up the report for this week’s writers’ group meeting. I had 25 minutes of social media, 25 minutes of...

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24 September 2019

Diary of a Novel: plotting Acts I, II and III

I picked up the story bible for The Beast Within at the weekend and was mortified to see I’ve not done anything practical since the end of May. Saying that, I have been reading. I’m still on Writing the Killer Mystery by Ron D Voigts, Volume 3: Plotting the Murder. But I stalled when I got to the end of the book and didn’t know...

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24 September 2019

Tuesday 24 September 2019

I had a late start yesterday. I was quite tired, the poet had left early for a business trip, and I slept in. I got to my desk at around 10:30am, but I’d done my first Pomodoro’s work on the phone the night before, so I didn’t really lose anything. First job was yesterday’s writing diary blog post. This job...

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23 September 2019

Monday 23 September 2019

Well, by the end of the week, I’d done a load of Pomodoros and got a lot of work done. Very productive indeed. I did start to wilt around mid-afternoon on Friday, though. The morning began once again over breakfast with me reading the latest book for NetGalley.  I’m really enjoying this Christmas story and looking forward to starting the...

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14 August 2019

Wednesday 14 August 2019

We had a good session at the writers’ group on Monday. I’ll be writing a report just as soon as I can fit one in. Yesterday was a very busy day. The morning was spent doing admin for the Richard Cadbury book. I’ve arranged to meet his great-great-granddaughter in Birmingham next week and I had to do some jiggery-pokery to...

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8 August 2019

Thursday 8 August 2019

Much of Tuesday was spent doing the client edit. I had promised it back by Tuesday, and he was going to get it back by Tuesday. I’d completed the hard copy edit the day before, apart from the last few pages, which I then read over breakfast. Once I got dressed and to my desk, I managed a little writing...

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6 August 2019

Tuesday 6 August 2019

I’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...

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25 July 2019

Thursday 25 July 2019

Yesterday’s to-do list was slightly adventurous … but I did it all. It doesn’t look a lot, but it is still time-consuming. I was late getting up, don’t forget, due to the storm the previous night, but my list didn’t get any shorter as a result. The first hour was spent reading. I read a chapter of the new NetGalley...

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17 July 2019

Wednesday 17 July 2019

It was so hot here yesterday I ended up stripping down to just a nightie and flip flops to sit and work in. That felt both refreshing and quite liberating. I’m not complaining. The last house was the coldest house in the world and cost us a fortune to heat. At least that’s one thing less to worry about here....

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15 July 2019

Busy writing, editing, proofreading …

My own work has become quite lax of late, with me either feeling very sorry for myself (tooth extraction) or concentrating on work for other people once again. (And I have toothache!) Last week I was busy finishing a “heavy proof” for lovely-already-client, and a new edit came in from lovely-new-regular-client. I was also approached by also-lovely-new-regular-client to see if...

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