Summer is supposed to be quiet for work. Not this year. Training, hiring, and procedures have been dominate in my day job. It’s been busy – very busy.
It’s been so busy finding time to take vacation has not been easy. However, I’m on vacation from the day job! I’ve got a full week off and I’m filling it with what I want to do.
Now some people think I schedule my life too much… sometimes I do. But for this week I haven’t.
Saturday and Sunday were normal weekend days. We did chores, ran errands, and I worked on writing stuff. I did my author talk and then met with a group of authors to talk about writing and life. I also worked my way through final edits for two manuscripts. They got sent off to my formatter.
Monday I worked on another manuscript – my longest of this batch. In my process I go through a lot of steps for editing and one of the final ones is to do a paper edit. I know this sounds weird to some people with all our technology. I actually print out a copy of the manuscript and edit on paper.
When I’m done with the edit, I turn it over to my sister who goes through it to enter the edits I’ve done. She also reads it again for me and adds anything she catches. She emails it back for me. I go through it to make sure the edits are correct (sometimes I wonder where my head was). Then I do an edit check and read through.
Today I tackled the last of the four manuscripts. I’ve added the author’s note and the acknowledgement and will send it off to my formatter so she can do the formatting for me.
One of the stories I sent to one of my beta readers. She and I talked through some of the story and there were some pretty serious rewrites done on it. Since I did that one yesterday, I’ve let it sit today. Tomorrow I’ll probably read through it but my beta reader said she’d try to read it this weekend so I might hold off.
Next step – well in doing my edits, I’ve culled some good quotes to add to graphics for posting. I’ll work on those. I also need to set up all seven stories (the three Dragon Descendant short stories in addition to the four manuscripts) in Asana which is my project management software. That will be time consuming but worth it as it keeps me on track when I’m doing other things like writing.
My hope is tomorrow I’ll work on client editing work and then tackle some writing. We’ll see. I’m not rushing things. I’m enjoying my days of leisurely working on books. Oh and because I like numbers I’ve edited 264,637 words in the last four days. Not quite done but happy with my progress. I still have plenty of days left in my week and I’m looking forward to seeing where my muse and tasks will take me.
I have options – oh so many of them – so I’m not picking tonight. I’m enjoying the accomplishments of my leisure time.