Still exhausted and doing no writing, I’ve been working eight hours a day on the shed. It’s coming along.

Slowly, a lot slower than I’d like, but I’m getting there. These jobs always take far longer and cost far more than planned, and the shed is no exception.

The photo is where I was yesterday morning. Today, the whole interior – walls, ceilings, and even the z-framed timber door, have polystyrene insulation. It’s not beautiful. I patchworked a lot of odd size pieces together to reduce the amount of wastage. But it should be functional, especially when I add a layer of foil over the top, which I hope will seal all the gaps well enough.

I don’t know how my husband worked in the shed when it was his computer workshop. He must have frozen his butt off in winter and barbecued it in summer. I grew up in Australia. Heat I’m okay with, but my cold tolerance is minimal. I normally wear three layers of thermal underwear under my clothes, and fingerless gloves inside our house in the British winter, so a freezing drafty shed is not doing to do it for me. Insulation is more important than how it looks!

I’m hoping I can achieve both a comfortable and an attractive writing space though.

Next comes the foil, and taping all the gaps in that, then I’ll staple up a tented ceiling from an old white sheet. Don’t want to risk anything heavier on the ceiling, there’s not enough to nail into. It would NOT help my writing to have the ceiling fall on my head! The walls will be light spruce tongue and groove boards.

I’ll need to ensure I fix the leaks, before I start that. There are a couple of broken edges on boards outside that I’ll patch. I’ve put new support under the shed and stopped the water tracking up where it rotted out in that damp corner. I’ve ordered better window perspex, and guttering and a water tank. My lovely husband is painting the outside for me.

Luckily, we finally have summer! No rain at all the last two days. It’s been beautifully sunny and all a British summer day should be, after raining heavily every day so far this month. I hope it stays dry. I won’t get much more done until Thursday now, between the Day Job and visiting the MiL.

The lovely thing about this sort of physical work is that my mind has been free to wander. Yesterday, I came up with a new story idea. It will be fun to write. At last some characters based on my Flying Doctor days I feel happy with! I don’t think they’re romance cliches. It doesn’t feel like it at this stage. I’m looking forward to mining that period of my life. The story needs a lot of development work yet. Mind mapping, and finding out more about who these people are.

But I’m resisting the temptation to chase the bright new shiny. I’ll edit the Christmas story first. I’m almost to the stage where I have enough distance from the writing of it to do the edits justice, and to want to start back into it again. With no words count constraints, I think it will end up around five thousand words longer than the version I submitted. I’ll address the issues the editor pointed out in the rejection. The choppy jerky writing and the lack of clarity, product of cutting too much to get word count within limits.

I know it will take a lot of work, and I’m looking forward to that!