Writing and not writing: Day 4

MB's been here overnight so I have to make an early start to get some work done before she gets up. I check a dino spread I wrote yesterday, correct a few things and send it off. Then she's up. It's 7am. I persuade her to get into my bed with her toy panda so I can do a bit more work (and so she doesn't get too grouchy as she's only had 9 hours' sleep and usually has has 10), but she just lies there talking to me. We discuss a book I'm working on and she gives her opinion of the publishing schedule, which would be very sensible except that it doesn't take account of the different times of summer and winter in the northern and southern hemispheres. We briefly discuss the complexities this adds to international publishing: the books will come out in north and south at the same time, so her suggestion that the titles connected with cold weather come out in winter doesn't quite work. But she does say one thing that I pass on to the publisher later and we agree to take into account. Cutting-edge market research/customer consultation in children's publishing takes place with your key consultant snuggled under a duvet with a cuddly panda. All business should be done like this.

Ptera-girl and her pterosaur

Eventually I give up and we go downstairs to have breakfast and build her Playmobil ambulance. That takes an hour. We had an agreement for the morning: ambulance, school work, play with ambulance, Zoom call to my dad, lunch, her Zoom play date with her friend. But instead we play with the ambulance and other Playmobil until it's time for the dadly Zoom call. We invent a super-hero called Ptera-girl who rides a giant pterosaur and rescues people, a surprising number of whom need to go in an ambulance. My super-hero boy gets demoted because his eagle loses to the pterosaur in a battle. I spend at least half an hour adding hair to all the Playmobil people who have been scalped over a period of promiscuous, hair-swappping, pandemic months.

After the Zoom call I sneak in some time to answer emails before going downstairs. She is allowed to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube while I do the Zoom call so she's happy if I extend the time by 15 minutes. We have lunch and finally do the bit of left-over schoolwork, with much grumbling, before her Zoom play date. Then I go upstairs and work, just fielding occasional requests to print mermaid colouring sheets, reach her unicorn dressing gown from the hook, and other such essentials. Her friend's mum is a lawyer. We are both using the play date to get work done. This is the usual pandemic juggling act. I've had three straight days of work before this day, which is probably the first time since the start of the current lockdown. A good chunk of time goes on a chat with the bank to sort out some irritating banking issue, and then an hour on working out my working hours and schedule for the next two weeks now I know everyone's shifts. I send the schedule to the dinosaur editor so we can try to make the to-ing and fro-ing all work as pages move between me, the editor, the artwork team, the designer and the consultant. 

The hospital has an over-crowded out-building

Then I flit unproductively between projects, keeping them all going but settling on none. I work on a picture book for a while, but immediately have to email the editor as I can't remember if we agreed a word count and the information, if I have it, is on the computer MB is using. I add a few bits to an outline. The stream of little interruptions, and the times I interrupt myself to check the loud noises from downstairs are OK noises, makes it hard to settle on something and do it properly. With her Zoom ended, at 4pm, we play more before her dad comes to take her away. It's 5.30 before I can get back to work, and I've not been out of the house all day. I work till 6:30, but rather unproductively, and then walk up to Waitrose to get some fresh air before a Zoom dinner at 8 pm.

Achievements: built an ambulance; helped design a super-hero; tweaked series concept to accommodate MB's insight into how readers might use the books; very slight progress on two outlines; some useful emails

Disachievements: omitting to upload Day 3 until late in the day; failing to make required fancy meal for Zoom dinner and keeping my food out of shot (at least that's possible); not getting enough of MB's school work done. We don't have much half-term left for catching up before the whole lot starts piling up again

Writing and not-writing: Day 3

 Off to a mixed start today. Worrying about having agreed to the latest lot of presentation materials, I decide to make a start on them. They are not urgent (yet) so technically the lowest priority task but I needed to get an idea of how long they might take. I write a complete draft in 30 minutes and realise it will only take another 30 at most to polish it. This is easy money, and reassuring. No sooner am I at the end of it, at 7:30, when MB and her dad turn up. I have to drive them home so I can drop the car off for MOT at the garage near my house. I do that, stopping at the garden centre to buy compost while I have a car — but don't get any as they offer to deliver it, which is even easier. Yoghurt and raspberries and back to work: but now 2 hours have passed and the high of virtually finishing the presentation materials gives way to gloom about other projects. Start with a dinosaur. Dinosaurs are a good way of easing into work.

One dinosaur done and daily Zoom call to the elderly one finished. I read a publishing contract and send an email asking for the changes I want. Suddenly it looks a bit late to be starting anything new before lunch. I realise I don't actually know how many pages/words are supposed to be in the book I was about to start, so delay that till after lunch. I decide to watch London Zoo's cub-cam recordings of baby tigers playing. This is actually work. Yes, I know. I get paid to watch videos of tiger cubs. There are some up-sides to this job! I make notes and wonder if the local zoo is open (they have tigers) or if they are a victim of lockdown. They are not open, it appears.

Nor is lunch; well,  carrots and hummus seems to be all I have. No bread, no cheese, nothing else remotely quick to make. Mental note to self: buy food before tonight as MB is here and will play merry hell if there is no food tomorrow. I read the Atlantic online and water the lemon tree in an attempt to put off the evil moment of actually tackling some real work, but it has to be done. The garage phones to say the car has failed its MoT and I tell them to fix it without asking what it will cost.

I work most of the afternoon, doing a chunk of an outline for a book on the history of science and a bit of admin. Then I walk to the vaccination clinic, just in case (closed) and to Waitrose where I buy a load of reduced stuff including a nice curry for my daughter who's been at work since 7:15 this morning and won't finish till 9pm. I stop off at the garage and beg them for the car, which they have finished but not cleaned, and they give it to me in exchange for many ££s. I go home and eat some of the unnecessary apricot frangipane tart I bought and write a dino spread, then drive over to pick up MB for the night. End of any useful work. I refuse to let her start building the Playmobil ambulance at 8pm. I feed her and read Mrs Pepperpot and we both go to sleep. 

Achievements: cars MoT'd, 1; spreads on dinosaurs, 2; outlines tinkered with (relatively unproductively), 2; rough drafts of sample material completed, 1

Disachievements: most of the day...

Writing and not-writing diary: Day 2

At my desk with coffee at 6:15 to find that I missed the British Library event (online) I paid to attend yesterday evening because I was still battling dinosaurs. If I watch it now, I won't start proper work until late, so I'll try to remember later — but it's only available for 48 hours. It's relevant to a book I'm not writing. That is, a book I was sporadically doing bits with until lockdown #1, and which just needed a good chunk of free time to sort out its shape. But a chunk of free time in which the British Library and the Bodleian were both open and accessible. So it's a book I'm not writing, and possibly never will write...

I look at my rather ropey schedule and decide it's time to bite the bullet and do the outline I've been avoiding I was keen on this project a few weeks ago, had good ideas, sent off my concept — and then the publisher sat on it for some weeks while my enthusiasm withered and my calendar filled up. I'm pretty sure I'll be keen on it again once I get started. At this stage I only need to do presentation materials: a few spreads and an outline. They'll use this to try to secure foreign co-edition deals and if they do, the book will go ahead. I'm part way through another set of presentation materials for one of my regular publishers, too, and I've yet another set requested yesterday. These can be tricky because too much emotional investment in them leads to disappointment if they don't go ahead, and too little leads to them not going ahead because the work lacks the spark that enthusiasm gives it. I wonder if a walk in the early-morning dark would help? No, it's just displacement activity. Today had better be Outline Day. Grim. And today's opera from the Met is Falstaff, which is not the best to work to. I work to the day's opera from the Met all day, playing it on repeat until I get bored with it and go looking for another opera on the Radio 3 archive. I listened to La Bohème four times yesterday. When the pandemic ends, they will stop the daily free broadcasts and I'll have to make my own choices.

Today I need to get this outline at least started and at best finished; write a proto-spread of a book on coral reefs; answer all the emails I've been ignoring; check the final bit of artwork on the consultancy project, when it comes; and write one of the outstanding dino spreads. So — on with the outlines!

I start the most outstanding (in terms of time, not quality) outline, but then a friend asks me to post her some plant cuttings. As she's a publishing consultant, this is kind of publishing related, no? (No, I know it's not.) I stop work and do it, walking to the post office and buying croissant and raspberries for breakfast on the way back and suddenly it's nearly two hours later. And although I'd made a good start on the outline I can't get back into it and everything I write looks like rubbish, so I noodle around online, but don't happen to come across anything useful. In 20 mins I can legitimately make coffee and Zoom my dad. I catch up with emails as the writing isn't happening...

Emails done, but not exactly dusted. The new commission batted into the middle distance while I think, existing commissions picked up and replied to and then resettled to collect dust until they start wriggling. After lunch (toasted sandwich this time, it's heading downhill already) I start writing a spread on coral reefs but then glimpse Adèle Geras and Helen Craig walking down the road. True, you can't glimpse people walking down the road if you are looking at your laptop. The exciting prospect of speaking to an adult is too much to resist. I drop everything,  grab my coat and run out to join them on a short walk to the bird pond. (It's a very literary area around here.) And then I wander down to see if the vaccination clinic is running today (it's not) and past the coffee man which inspires me to make coffee when I got home, and so here it is at 3pm and hardly anything achieved. But the walk with Adele and Helen was a splinter of bright normality as sharp as broken glass that refocuses the day. Settled, I find an email from another publisher who wants me to do something and to call for a chat about projects. Projects are the last thing I need right now. Back to coral reefs and sourcing sharks that live near Florida.

Post-shark, the final chapter of the consultancy project has come in so I do that just so that a project can count as finished (at least until it comes back). The work is irritating but quickly done, so I turn back to the outline I gave up this morning. I sketch out a list of six things to cover in the chapter I'd got nothing for, which is huge progress but is also only actually six words. But then I get a message from my daughter asking me to drive her to the hospital (she works there, it's not an emergency) and sit in the car with MB for ten minutes while she picks up some stuff she needs, so I'm let off the outline again. 

 Back at my desk at 6pm to realise the whole day has gone on bits and pieces. Now what? Give up, watch the British Library thing I missed and drink gin? Or get on and do something useful? These books, sadly, won't write themselves and I've agreed to two more things and an open-ended 'let's talk about proejcts' during the course of the day, so the list is getting longer rather than shorter. Gin and dinosaurs, I think...

Achievements: outlines of an outline, 1; spreads on dinosaurs, 1; proto-spreads on coral reefs, 1; completed consultancy projects, 1 (yay!)

Disachievements: Discover I've started the wrong picture book outline as the editor wants to kick off the series with a different title; agreed to one more project and a chat about other new projects (this can go in either achievements or disachievements really); a lot of skiving

Writing and not-writing diary: Day 1

I've not done very well at rebooting. Turned out I don't work well in a pandemic. All the projects I thought I'd do when I had time were really projects I might do when I had time AND wasn't stressing about a deadly pandemic. Ah well. A couple of books came out of it, not least this one. Commissioned April 2020, we did wonder whether it would all be over by the time it was published. Not even close... Even though it took an incredible 85 days to ship from printing China it's still out in good time.

Although the pandemic is not over, publishing seems to be getting back on its feet so I'm working consistently again. Having lots to do is always a spur to me to do other things so that I suddenly have too much to do. Not sure why. Hence I'm back here...

The other day I discovered this wonderful translation diary blog by Daniel Hahn. One of the most talented people in publishing (and one of the nicest) he's documenting the process of writing a translation as it goes, with all the hiccups, embarrassments and strokes of genuis involved. It's fascinating. So much of what he says really resonates — it's how I work, even though I'm not translating. So I thought I'd do something slightly similar here. It won't follow a single book as I'd need permission from a publisher to do that. Instead it will document what I do each day on different writing projects. If you are doing this job it might have some voyeuristic appeal, in the way that nosing around someone else's writing space always does. If you're not doing it but want to, it might show you what you're letting yourself in for. And for me it will be a record of how I spend my time for a week, or maybe longer if I keep it up. I'll add in what else I do occasionally, where it's not too embarrassing.  This reflects my pandemic working mode, not how I work 'normally', which involves a good deal of sitting in Cambridge University Library and going to the tea room a lot. Need-to-know: MB is my grand-daughter who I look after a lot of the time (as her parents are both keyworkers).

16 Feb, Tuesday. No MB today so it's a straight work day. Coffee at my desk at 7am, checking first-pass layouts for a dinosaur book on a tight schedule. There's a couple of pages to write from scratch, but I finish the corrections, edits and extra artwork suggestions for the rest of the chapter by 12:45, taking time out for breakfast (blueberries, Greek yoghurt and chia seeds), to feed the chickens and to do the daily Zoom call check-up on my elderly dad. There's an email from another editor with layouts to check for a project I'm acting as consultant for, but I object as I've read all the text before and commented extensively. We agree I'll just check the artwork, which I've not seen before. I do three chapters, then have lunch (Marmande tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, avocado, olives, pine nuts, olive oil, pomegranate molasses and olive ciabatta — don't worry, there will be plenty of days when it's fish finger sandwiches). 

Back to email. There's a message from an editor asking if I want to write a book for her, with publication date of 'June 22'. Instantly assume she means 22nd June before remembering it's 2022 next year, just in time not to fire off a 'You crazy?' email response. Decide to ignore it for a while as I've spent too long juggling my schedule over the last few days already. Email from another editor reminds me I'm supposed to be doing a short book for her. I've not started it. Deadline is (happily) extended from end Feb to mid March. I'm also aware of a fiction outline I've been ignoring which is now getting critical. I'm hoping it's working itself out in my subconscious but this could prove to be a vain hope. There's also a message from an editor I've just sent an outline to saying he's passing it on to the illustrator to start work. This is a series I write for a lot and I write straight into the InDesign template. The book is already laid out using the rough artwork when I get it, and this method means I can fit the text exactly to the illustrations and there's no copy-fitting faff later. It gives me some happy days messing about with InDesign, which I like. No word of when the roughs will come back so I can't schedule this one, but the outline was so full the book is virtually written. It will be a cut and paste job, essentially. 

I was going to spend today doing the outline I've been ignoring and hoping is writing itself self sub-conciously, but now it's 2 pm and I've got another three chapters or the consultancy text to check pictures in, and two new spreads to write for the dino book. I want to go for a walk but have to wait in for MB's Playmobil ambulance to be delivered. We missed the attempted delivery yesterday as we'd gone to the park to practise cycling and climbing the perilous climbing frame. I'm kicking myself for writing one new dino spread without waiting for the publisher to OK the choice of dino, as now it's been vetoed on the basis of unavailable artwork. So that was a couple of hours wasted and, more importantly, a dino I wanted in is kicked out. So consultancy or dinos or reply to emails? I decide to start this blog diary and another half hour goes. I feel like making a mermaid meme but that would not really be productive at this stage. Consultancy, then — it can be finished quickly.

By 15:45, the consultancy is finished as far as possible, in that I've now done all the chapters he's sent me. I know there's one to go, and this is annoying as I can't tick the task off. Sometimes I think the only reason I do anything is so I can tick it off. I dip into FB to chat to a friend who's trying to work out how to do something in Zoom for a school visit. Other people's problems are always more fun to think about than your own. It's now a choice between more dinos and one of the things I've been ignoring, so I walk to the garden centre. 

Bought some bulbs, backed out of buying a grape vine as it requires serious planning since it will be there for years. In going to the garden centre I completely forgot my plan to hang around outside the vaccination centre to pick up a last-minute Pfeizer jab because they give them to anyone around 5 mins before closing to avoid wasting them. Ah well. At least I have some nice flowers. So I came back and did more dinos, this time choosing replacements and writing a new spread on Ichthyosaurus and having a grumble to the lovely editor. More snacks — freshly squeezed orange juice, which was a weird colour as one of the oranges turned out to be a blood orange, and a slice of gin panettone that a highly esteemed and dearly beloved novelist friend gave me for Christmas. Finally sent in the Ichthyosaurus and associated corrected spreads and made pasta with spinach, mushrooms and feta. Enough is enough. Wine, pasta, and reading Monique Roffey's Costa-winning Mermaid of Black Conch. All the ignored projects have been successfully ignored for another day.

Achievements: Artwork checked, 100 pages; new writing, 2 pages; layouts corrected, 12 pages

Disachievements: New commissions ignored, 1; existing commissions with outstanding tasks and no progress today, at least 3; letters not sent, at least 3; VAT returns not started, 1.

 

Along for the ride — with quails

Well, that reboot plan didn't go well. My mother died in the autumn, and my daughter and her little family moved out, all in the space of two weeks. And now we're all in lockdown. It's a kind of overdose of isolation, starting in October and building to peak isolation. I'd just started to get back to work properly when the virus hit us all and most of my book projects were cancelled or suspended indefinitely. So no, no progress so far on getting the blog back up and running. But now, with all this time?

Isn't it odd how we can spend years seeking out moments to devote to pet projects and then when there is an endless of desert of time ahead, the inclination to knuckle down disappears? OK, it's probably been eaten by anxiety. But I'm going to try to drag it back. I've had three weeks inside (and in the garden — I'm lucky to have a garden). That must be long enough to wallow, drift, or go round in small circles of confusion and aimlessness. Let's say it was time needed for acclimatization. But books don't write themselves and projects don't pick themselves up off the floor. If you are happy pottering and enjoying the freedom to do nothing all day, that's brilliant. If, like me, you are frustrated at your own inactivity, let's see if we can find a way out of it. Any suggestions you have gratefully received. I'm going to start today by making a list of the things I would ideally like to achieve during lockdown. I know I won't do all of them. But it will be disgraceful if I do none of them. Some will be work. Some will be non-work.

I have already started one, yesterday. Finally despairing of the chicken-man's inability to provide any chickens after a foxing episode reduced by flock to one solitary rooster (lots of non-chicken people have decided to keep covid-chickens, apparently) I have downsized to quails. I ordered some quail eggs with my shopping and have put them in the incubator. If all goes well, that's eighteen days to quailhood. (It might well not go well; only some of the quail eggs you buy are fertile, and the rat-man — an expert on this — says try different suppliers, but Waitrose is good.)

Today's target, then: turn quail eggs three times; write up quail chart with days, turn times, temperature requirements etc; write list of things to be achieved; start working on book outline for final commissioned project. If you want to play along, but your goals in the comments and we can all revisit and check how we're doing. I think making things public makes you more likely to stick to them.

Good luck!