oh I do like to be beside the…

Current work: admin and thinking about next books
Listening to: Bryan Adams
Reading: Sarah Morgan, The Greek Billionaire's Love Child (lovely fast read - though Sarah and I often have 'great minds think alike' moments, and in this she's given the heroine a backstory I'd been thinking about using!)

Great guitar lesson yesterday. Jim got me to sight-read a pile of grade pieces, and it did wonders for my confidence (as well as being enormous fun). I was a bit sarcastic about one piece (‘The Raging Sea’) so my homework this week is to write a piece called ‘The Raging Sea’, involving syncopation. I’m tempted to do a punk rendition of ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’. Or is that cheating?

Especially as I'm off to the seaside today. Think it might be just lunch at the Priory (no, not THAT Priory) rather than the walk we'd originally planned, as the forecast is for thundery rain.

Lovely ed emailed me yesterday with the title for my March 2010 release: The Doctor’s Lost-and-Found Bride. It's a reunion story so I think it suits it.

My office is now tidy (well, tidier), thanks to help from Miss ‘I love tidying’. I did ask her if she was mad. She claims not. I still have a box to sort through (quite a big one, too), but I’ll do that one handful at a time, on the ‘touch each piece of paper only once’ principle. And somehow she got three new books out of it...

DH and I had a serious discussion yesterday about diet and exercise, and I ordered the new Wii fitness programme thingy (Active Sports or whatever it’s called). I know, I know: I am Kate Couch Potato (or, perhaps more accurately, Kate Glued To Keyboard - Ashes to Ashes finished this week, so that's about 1/3 of my weekly viewing gone) and exercise doesn't thrill me the way playing guitar and reading do, but I have to do something about my very bad case of Writer’s Bottom (a particularly grim combo with the beginnings of middle-age spread). As I don’t want to waste prime work time going to a gym, this might be a good compromise.

Let me elaborate on what I mean by wasted time. My work day starts at 8.45. If I have a class at, say, 10, and it takes me 20 minutes to get there - that leaves me 55 minutes for work before the class. Minus 20 mins for thinking myself into book world, that's 35 minutes to work and that's hardly worth it. Class finishes at 11, shower, home - back at my desk at 11.30, and that leaves me half an hour before lunch, less 20 mins to think myself back into book world. Oh, look, I have 45 minutes to work out of a whole morning. And it's split into two sessions. So it's not an effective use of my time. Do this three times a week, and my productivity will nosedive. (Ditto my earnings. And then how would I pay for gym membership?)

However. If I do a 30-minute workout at home, at 8.45, then have a shower, my work day will then start at 9.30. So that means instead of only having 45 minutes to work in a morning, I have two and a half hours. Less 20 minutes' thinking time, and that's two hours and ten minutes in one lovely chunk.

Given that I probably spent 45 minutes in the morning messing about on the internet while I'm thinking myself into work mode (aka playing solitaire - and I know I'm not the only one who does that), if I don't look at email or the net until I've done my daily quota, it'll just be switching my time from mooching through to exercise, and once I've got the hang of the routine I'll be able to use exercise time as thinking time as well.

That's the plan. (Anyone want to start a book on how long this will last?)

Righty. My accounts are calling...