Diary of a Tiger: Wed 28 Sep 2022

Chapter 33: Wednesday 28 September – or ‘there should be another writing prompts post here but I STILL don’t have one ready…’

Gosh, so much has happened since my last Diary of a Tiger post on 7 September. We had already started to completely wind down for the house move, and then the queen passed away and I was glued to the television for several days – not one day after the other, but various odd days throughout the entire period of national mourning.

Then, of course, we did have the house move and we still have so much stuff it was a major operation just packing. The house we left was a big house too, and that took a lot of cleaning. Plus, we had the garden to dismantle too. And in amongst it all, I ghostwrote Book 11 Part 1 and submitted it on a Sunday evening.

I’m not going to go into it all again. However, I will say that this latest move has probably been the worst one ever – and don’t forget that includes a move from Solihull to Barnsley back in 2004. Yes, it’s been that difficult. Perhaps it’s our age.

Throughout all of the recent time off, I still managed to publish a book every week, and I even wrote or finished a couple of new stories too. Also while I was off, I sat through an online workshop of 10 videos again to refresh my memory and to add the assignment to my story-writing schedule. We opened up the Monkey Dust diary for 2023 and started to take bookings for that. And I started to read a new series of books.

Monday
I was back at work on Monday, even if I was without a proper office.

To kick the week off, my new book Five Slightly Sinister Short Stories was published.

This is a collection of 5 stories that are a bit sinister and a bit short.

You can find all of my books on the BUY MY BOOKS tab on the blog, or you can go to www.books2read.com/DianeWordsworth.

I made the flyers for this publication and shared them across social media. I also went around taking some photographs for Monday’s blog and shared those across social media too.

I caught up on daily competitions… which actually took most of the day as I hadn’t entered any for several weeks. During the break, I did win a competition: two tickets to see Grand Designs Live at the NEC in Birmingham. I’m not sure if we’ll go or not as we’re still really busy in the new house and the poet’s band is working almost every weekend now until 2 weeks before Christmas.

I spent far too much time getting annoyed at the current owners of Doncaster Sheffield Airport, who have refused to negotiate any kind of deal to stay open, including an offer to have their operational losses covered until October 2023. I mean, who turns down that kind of offer? Eight hundred people are lined up to lose their jobs, even though Manchester Airport has offered interview opportunities to anyone prepared to relocate – commuting in the midst of the current economic crisis will be untenable.

One of my Tweets regarding this topic went a bit ‘viral’ for me, said she tongue in cheek. It garnered 29 ‘likes’, 6 retweets, and 3 comments. That’s a lot for me, when I have less than 500 followers.

I was disappointed by the end of the day when the poet came home from work and I wasn’t able to give him a ghostwriting word-count.

Tuesday
On Tuesday I wrote up a book review, created the graphics, and shared it all over social media, as well as wrote a blog post about it. The NetGalley books are a multi-task project in my ClickUp workspaces and I remembered to tick off all of the shares (blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Goodreads, Amazon).

The Medium post also requires reformatting. While I was on Medium, I had a quick look around as it’s changed quite a lot really… Looking at the changes, I can’t see it being a very big part of my future…

Daily competitions were a lot quicker, as I’d caught up the day before, and when I’m on top of it they don’t even take 10 minutes.

Then I created the poster for Monkey Dust’s gig this coming Saturday and added the gig to Diane’s Gig List, the latter of which is no longer managed by the poet or me but by a friend.

I shared the poster on Facebook, but didn’t bother creating an event for it yet as Facebook have made events too much of a faff and I didn’t really have the time.

I’m currently working in the dining room and we can tell that the temperature outside has dropped for autumn. I don’t really want to turn the heating on for the entire house when I’m confined to one room while I work, and perhaps the kitchen and bathroom. So I took some time out to go and find the little radiator that usually sits beneath my desk.

I had a read through the ghostwriting, removed all of Part 1 from the compile and prepared the folder in my Scrivener binder for Part 2. I thought I’d done really well when the poet called to say he was on his way home… and I still hadn’t even started.

So I wrote up today’s post, scheduled it to post, and then disconnected from the internet. I’ll add any updates for Tuesday to the next Diary post.

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