Summary:
Lots of clearing things off lists this week, reflecting on the past year and looking forward to new opportunities, new writing, new books for 2025!
Monday:
I woke up with ideas in my head about the last third of my current novel, A Wizard Calls My Name, so I added some more notes to my outline.
Then I edited the penultimate section of my last remaining paid client project of the year, a YA fantasy novel I’m really enjoying.
After lunch, I hosted an online focus session, in which I mostly went through my email inbox and tried to wrest back some control! I did a lot of admin around booking travel for the two writing retreats I’m attending in January. I did my last GYWO discussion post of the year, and I planned what I’d write in my own monthly blog.
I’m doing a six-month course designed to provide structure for finishing the first draft of a novel – there are monthly online workshops and I haven’t attended any of them so far… So I promised the other people on my focus Zoom call that I would turn up to the one tonight, despite really not wanting to spend another 2.5 hours on Zoom on a Monday night, after a full day of editing and admin…
But I went and it was really fun, as I knew it would be… It helped that I knew I’d be taking more than two weeks off from writing, editing, workshops and Zoom calls after tomorrow – followed by a glorious six days down in Devon on retreat in the second week of January!
I wasn’t sure the planned exercises would be useful to me – but I came out of the workshop with a full outline for a new short story I’ve been thinking about (which was very different to how I’d originally conceived it), plus some interesting ideas for another one as well.
Tuesday:
I finished editing the last section of the YA fantasy novel and sent it back to the author for review and approval – which cleared my client work to-do list for the rest of the year! Hurrah!
After lunch, it was Revision Club, but I’m taking a little break from the novel for a bit, so I re-edited a couple of Moomintroll Meditation videos I’d discovered I’d saved in the wrong version.
Then I did a couple of reviews of books I finished this week – Nasty Little Cuts by Tina Baker (which was part of a mystery book box I got for Christmas from one of my editors) and Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor.
Then, I worked on my last blog post for the year, reflecting on my achievements in 2024 and looking forward to what I hope to do with my writing and editing in 2025.
Wednesday:
I had planned a full day of podcast-related activity today, with two Reviews Revisited episodes to record and edit, and a lengthy main episode also to edit. But I had a slow start and only managed to do the edit of the Adventure Game main episode, so I had to punt the recordings to later in the week.
Friday:
I finally got around to recording and editing the two Reviews Revisited podcast episodes this evening, which was a good thing to tick off my list.
Sunday:
I finished one book yesterday (Thornhedge by T Kingfisher) and another book today (The Walled Garden by Sarah Hardy), so I wrote my reviews.
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