Paperback publishing stalled…

… and it’s not because of me.

Once I’d done a load of household chores, I arrived at my desk at 10:05am on Friday. When I’m supposed to be there at 10am, that’s not bad going. Or not on recent standards.

I had a bit of a whinge on a forum I belong to, and I completed about half a dozen feedback forms for them. Then I published Chapter 23 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat on Medium, and I scheduled the next two to publish on Saturday and Sunday.

I’ve noticed that when I post stuff in the mornings, the stories get more views. When I post later in the day, they get zero views. And by the time the following morning comes around, they’re buried beneath a load of other stories. So I decided to do them first thing in future.

I published Chapter 24 of Night Crawler on Medium, and then did the same with the next two chapters of that one too.

The mobile hairdresser came and cut both of our hairs, and then I stopped for something to eat.

Right after dinner, I created the full covers for the other two paperbacks. Then I started to work on the interior for Twee Tales Too. Fortunately, with the other one still fresh in my mind, I didn’t have to do so much referring to keep them consistent with each other.

However, I seem to have hit a stumbling block because the pdf converter is converting regular bold face to title case, and that just isn’t workable. I tried loads of times, and even loaded the file that had worked the day before, but it didn’t want to play.

I can only think that there might have been a glitch that day in the converter software, so I fired off an email to support. So far, and despite chasing on both Facebook and on Twitter, I’ve not had a reply. So the paperback publishing is back on the back burner until it’s fixed.

The paperback of Twee Tales went live on Friday. You can see that here. As soon as the others are live, I’ll share links to those as well.

The weekend

We had a busy weekend.

We had shopping to do on Saturday, plus birthday cards to deliver to the kids. It was the twins’ birthday yesterday and it’s Son #1’s birthday on Wednesday, the same day as my brother’s. And we had some electronic and music stuff to pick up and store for Son #1.

On Sunday we went to have a look at some houses that took our fancy. I really don’t want to move again any time soon, but we did say that if we saw something and thought ‘Wow!’, then we would consider it.

House #1 was a mega WOW. House #2 wasn’t very nice and was struck off. House #3 was another wow, but not quite as mega as the WOW wow.

When we got back, I fired off emails to #1 and #3, but they’ve stopped booking viewings for #3. I await a reply from #1, but we are already experienced with that particular agency, so I won’t hold my breath.

And I didn’t do any work at all. I didn’t even manage to look at a new outline the ghostwriting client sent me.

Last week

Here, then, is how last week went in the end:

start 1st instalment of ghostwriting gig #5 ✅
start to write 1 brand-new short story or series instalment (target: 2,000 words or 3,500 words) ❎
start to plan 1 brand-new article for Medium ✅
request another Medium publication adds me as a contributor ✅
publish Night Crawler chapters on Medium daily ✅
publish Diary of a Scaredy Cat chapters on Medium daily ✅
write a blog post every day, including Wednesday’s writing prompts ✅
publish a short story from the archives on Medium (Bonfire Surprise) ✅
publish a Wednesday Writing Prompts from the archives on Medium ✅
republish Twee Tales paperback on KDP ✅
republish Twee Tales Too paperback on KDP ❎
republish Twee Tales Twee paperback on KDP ❎
continue to proofread Baggins Bottom Best Bits Book 4 ❎
publish A Stranger At Eight on Kindle Unlimited (short story) ✅
publish Arrivederci Roma on Kindle Unlimited (short story) ✅
publish Ash Wednesday on Kindle Unlimited (short story) ✅
start to collate content for Words Worth Reading monthly magazine ❎
start to read through Mardi Gras (steampunk novella) ❎
read the next book on the list for NetGalley ✅
have my 2nd Covid jab (Wednesday) ✅
hair cut (Friday) ✅

I don’t know that I’ll have time to catch up on any of those crosses this week, with me having two 80,000-word ghostwriting gigs on the go. But at least some of the crosses were down to outside influences rather than me simply not getting around to them all.

Here are all of the chapters on Medium for Diary of a Scaredy Cat so far, and here they are for Night Crawler. You can also see all of the short stories so far here.

Non-members can read up to 3 stories a month on Medium; members can read unlimited stories – and there are a lot of good articles on there too. In fact, I’m reading more articles on Medium that are of interest to me than I do in any published magazine.