My ‘Someday’ wishlist is full of projects I should totally get off my arse and make happen – which never actually happens, of course. So, I came up with a genius idea a while ago for attacking the list.
'Fifteen minute projects’.
I choose something which has been hanging around like a fart in an elevator, and each day I spend a quarter of an hour on it, usually after lunch. Mentally it’s like a quick spritz to get me into the afternoon, and even doing a small measure of work on something you haven’t touched for months or even years feels like genuine progress. Because it is.
My current 15 Minute Project is republishing He Died With A Felafel in His Hand. I secured the rights back from Pan MacMillan just before Covid, and didn’t get around to doing anything with them. Honestly, just getting them back (with Tassie Babes) was enough at that point. I’d thought them lost to me forever.
But I’ve had enough people approach me about wanting to buy a copy and being unable to, that I finally thought ‘It’s time’.
So today, after lunch, I gave it the 15-minute treatment.
Mostly that meant searching for the text files across a couple of different computers and discovering that while they weren’t completely unusable, they were a bit of a mess. Unformatted MS Word documents. And the original book, you may recall, had a lot of tricky formatting.
Oh, how very smart we thought we were with that tricky formatting.
Looks like I have more than a few of these quarter-hour sessions ahead of me.
Still, though, it’s nice to go back to my own origin story.
Can’t believe I lived like that.