When the Tools Don't Work: February Round-Up Post
Last month, I was raving about a new tool I'd found, wasn't I? For anyone who missed out on that post, you can find it here. The basic point, though, was that I'd found a tool to help me bring together all the disparate elements of my working life.
I was delighted. I was enthused.
I was rapidly disappointed.
For me, the most important part of any online project management software (and I've tried a few by now) is that downtime is limited. If there's no offline mode and if you constantly need to refer to things within that tool, it should be available as much as possible. I know some issues are unavoidable, but for the most part? Yep, I want reliability.
Unfortunately, a significant outage from Notion in February, coupled with a frustrating response on the part of the company, quickly convinced me Notion is not the tool for me. Rather than bed my systems in further, I looked elsewhere and I'm now plugging everything into ClickUp instead. It's a different type of tool, but I think I can make it work for me. It's just going to take some time to get things set up again. There'll be more on that in the future.
So, let's take a look at those February goals and see what happened:
Complete the final edits of Allegra: Book 1 (actual title TBC)
I've stuck this one on the back burner for a while. As much as I love Allegra and the Victorian era, it's not currently the type of thing my readers want from me and I got bogged down in thinking that every time I opened the document. By all means, let me know if you want Victorian lesbians from me - they're almost ready and waiting.
Restart newsletters for my fiction readers and Rhubarb Writing Shed subscribers
I've sent one survey email out from RWS but that's it so far. In my defence, I'm working on a plan to make the RWS community more vibrant, so there is activity going on behind the scenes.
Work on another novel
Yes, I accomplished one of my goals! The novel I started for NaNoWriMo 2020 back in November is finally finished. I wrote 13,000 words and brought the first draft to a close just shy of 60,000 words. That'll go in a drawer for a long, long time now since there are plenty of other things to work on.
Finally publish 99 Random Questions to Ask Your Characters
No. Close, but no.
As I said in my January round-up post, though, there's always March, right? And with a roadmap out of lockdown in sight and many of the people I love already half-vaccinated, March is already looking better than February.
Here are my March accountability goals:
Complete second draft of "Stevie"
Edit But By Degrees follow up short story
Restart newsletters for Kit Eyre and Rhubarb Writing Shed (yes, again)
Publish 99 Random Questions (as above)
I'll check in at the beginning of April (!) to share how I got on.