As well as arriving very late to my desk this morning, I then got distracted. Three times.
First of all, I saw that Martin Lewis, our money saving expert, has helped produce a textbook for schools, designed to teach kids about personal finance. The pdf for this book, and the teachers’ guide, are both free to download. Hard copies of the textbook are available to purchase from Amazon.
I have downloaded this book and the teachers’ guide already. I’m not a teacher, but I do wish we’d had something like this when I was at school. At that time, I was frequently one of those vocal pupils demanding to know why I needed to know trigonometry or algebra if I wasn’t planning on being a mathematician or a scientist. I mean, not once, in my entire life, have I ever needed my logarithms tables when I’ve been out shopping. Ever.
When I tried to download the book to my Kindle Fire, the files failed to open. So then I was distracted because Calibre wasn’t on my computer, and I had to go through all the rigmarole of downloading the latest version and configuring it, just so I could convert this pdf to a file I could open on my Kindle. I also sent it to my Kindle Paperwhite.
While I was doing that, I also converted a load of books I’d previously converted from epub to mobi, and I saved them all in one directory. But then I couldn’t understand why Calibre wasn’t showing all of my books in alphabetical or series order.
I had a few goes, and I found out how to sort my results, by title, by author and by publication date. But they’re still not in series order …
… oh, hang on … (nips off to look at Calibre …)
Okay, it is done. There’s a series field on there.
I’d also like a chronological order function, as the publication date isn’t necessarily in chronological order. But hey, we can’t have everything.
So now I have this financial education textbook, Your Money Matters, on all of my devices apart from my phone. But my phone storage is full anyway, and anyway, it’s due for renewal soon.
By the time I’d stopped faffing, it was dinner time. D’uh! 🙄
So, I started work in the afternoon. Tut, tut! But I still had my one hour of writing, during which I wrote 2,169 words against a target of 2,024, and my typing speed increased again, to 28 words per minute.
However, I have 2 days left and I realised that my 10-project planner is including August’s allocated writing in that daily target too. I actually have 7,173 words left to write, which means my correct daily target is closer to 3,600. Hmm. That’s a lot of typing tomorrow and Friday.
Fortunately, I finished the revisions for Twee Tales Too, so at least I have an extra hour each day (so long as there’s no content-editing work for me). It does mean, though, that Thursday and Friday will have to be proper 9am starts, giving me up to 4 hours each day to catch up.
If I can’t write 7,200 words in up to 8 hours, then I need to give up now. I’m already writing around 2,000 words per hour. It should be a doddle …
The revisions were the last 16 pages of the 72-page book, leaving no more pages to do for the rest of the week. Now I have to go through and make the electronic amendments, plus format it for ebook publication using links instead of page numbers for the contents.
The rest of what was left of the afternoon was spent on the client job.
