Monday Memo 1

Note to self – making the font smaller so your to-do list fits on one page doesn’t magically make it possible to actually do all those things in one month.

I had a plan. I worked out what I was going to write and when. I picked a reasonable goal for each month. I pretended I was sane for a few minutes.

The plan was to finish the first drafts of my series – Perfect Timing – through July and August. Perfectly realistic target.

Then I had an idea for another story. No, problem – I usually just add it to my list of future projects and get to it at some point. Accept this one is for an anthology that has a submission deadline. Okay… I had a look at my time table. An extra 15k wasn’t that much to add into July. I could do that.

The word count for the story went up to 20k. Well, that’s only another 5k or so. Nothing to worry about.

Then I saw another really great call for submissions. And another anthology deadline. I’d already added in 20k, what difference could another 15k make in the grand scheme of July?

Well, in the grand scheme of things, it actually means I’ve added another 35k into my writing time table, and another two novellas into my editing plans.

Don’t know if I’ll have any luck with either of the anthology submissions, but by the end of today I will have finished writing them both. I’ll tell you a bit more about them in the next Monday Memo.

As for my Perfect Timing series – I finished one in July and I’ve still got 4 first drafts left to finish this month. Not quite realistic to do it all in August, so I’m thinking that’s my goals for August and the start of September sorted out.

Then I can get onto another series of six novellas called The Clan which I've been plotting out for a while. At which point I'll be back up to date with where I would have been if I hadn't succumbed to the lure of the anthologies.

Unless I add something else in…

Exactly how small is it healthy to make the font on a to do list?