Wednesday 24 February 2021

Writing and not writing: Day 7

Supposedly the final day of writing this — at least it's all I committed to. I might keep going for a bit, as it's a useful record for me of how this pandemic became such a juggling act.

Up at 5:30 to make coffee and start work as I have only six hours between now and MB coming. She will be here, I think, till Wednesday morning, or possibly about 9 pm Tuesday. I start by tidying up and uploading Day 6, then go back to the comic-strip outline. I realise there are two chapter 4s. I had planned six chapters and now there are seven. This comes from splitting the task into micro-chunks in a fragmented work week. I very rarely do chapter headings without auto-numbering the style. This is why. I set about moving and cutting, and wonder whether to take up the editor's offer of making it a 128-page book. No. I will regret that further down the line if I do it just to speed up sending in the outline! I work till 8 and then go to Waitrose.When I get back, a book finally comes from Waterstones that I needed for an outline that has now been sent in, accepted and the book passed on to the illustrator for roughs so there will be no input from that book now. This is happening a lot; book orders are taking forever. I can see why people use Amazon, but I'm not giving in. Back to the recalcitrant outline.

I stop at 11:10 to make coffee and then do the daily dadly Zoom call; MB arrives as soon as I finish. We play with Playmobil for half an hour and then cycle to school to pick up her work pack for the week. Back home, we have some lunch and do part of one of the tasks. Her class Teams meeting is cancelled, so we watch the prescribed maths vidoe for the day, fast forwarding through the painfully slow bits. There are constant requests to 'use your interactive white board'. I don't know what they expect us to have, but a Macbook Air clearly isn't good enough. 

We go to the post office, which she grumbles about being boring as we have to stand outside in a queue for some incredibly long time, like about 8 minutes, and then on the way home she falls off her scooter, so a good deal of time goes into tending to grazes and bruises and hurt pride. I do a bit more of the dreaded outline while she does something — I'm not sure what — and then it's the bed, bath, story routine which takes until nearly 10pm. Nothing much has been done, besides terrorising some badgers. I determine to get up early and try to catch up a bit.



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