Natalie Allan

Beta Reading

After my epic fail on the productivity side of things last week, this week has started with a fruitfully.

On Sunday, I offered to do an emergency beta read for  friend of mine of twitter when she came to the end of her wits with her manuscript for her book. I began beta reading for her yesterday and managed to pass through the first 40 pages in two sittings. I estimate it will take me another week to complete this beta for her, seeing as her manuscript is very clean so far.

Helsinki Vampires Synopsis

On par with my super-productivity, I managed to write the outline for 11 chapters of Helsinki Vampires, the second book in my series, yesterday. I anticipate there are about eight more chapters to outline, perhaps ten, so I should be done with the outlining on that book this week.

The Dissapearing Husband

Okay, so he didn’t really disappear. There was no magic involved and I new exactly where he was.

On Friday he was asked to go to Cannock to help with a server install, and worked a couple of hours over. When the job wasn’t completed (because servers like to fuck up just to get the better of their admins), he was asked to go in and complete the job on Saturday. So he went in, worked 9am until about 6pm, but was unable to finish the job so had to go back in on Sunday.

Oh yeah, this server really hated its masters.

On Sunday, he arrived back in at 9am, worked off his socks with his colleague, and all seemed to be well. He called me at 10pm that night to tell me they were having major technical difficulties and would be probably be working on it through the night. By now, he’d been working for 13 hours.

I next heard from him at 8am on Monday morning. They were still there, working hard and the server was still refusing yield to their geekerly powers. Current hours worked: 23.

He finally arrived home a little after 5pm yesterday, after working all day Sunday, through the night, and all day Monday. Needless to say he was pooped. He’d worked 32 hours straight.

He crashed for five hours, I woke him up to feed him, then he went straight to bed to sleep the night away. And he was still up in time for work this morning. Now that’s dedication.

Now how can I apply that sort of dedication to my writing…?