Chapter 39: Tuesday 11 October
Tuesdays are usually book review days on the blog, but as I don’t have any ready, I’m throwing up another diary post instead.
Friday
On Friday I managed to do some ghostwriting work, including the revisions for Part 2 of Book 11. I sent those back along with some notes.
The poet had a gig in Doncaster Friday night, so the day finished earlier than we would like. He had a guitar to repair for one of his band mates before we went off to that though. It was a good night.
The weekend
I’d done the shopping on Thursday night to free up some of the weekend and we pretty much spent the entire 2 days at home. We had a late start, due to Friday’s late finish and I did hardly anything, when I really wanted to try and get ahead on the ghostwriting.
The poet pottered around, cutting down bushes in the garden, refelting the shed roof, and generally tidying up the garage and the shed. I think I played games and read books.
Curtains
On Sunday we popped out to get some curtains for the kitchen windows and doors. One of the windows is a funny shape and I was at a loss what to do with it. It’s a square dormer window consisting of 1 fixed and 2 full size openers, with nowhere to put any curtain rods or tracks. Then I had a bit of a brain murmur.
We’re going to try net curtain wire with very lightweight curtains, the 2 openers with channels for the wires along the top and the bottom, the single window with a channel just along the top of a pair of curtains.
Two of the windows will need a single (or half) curtain fixing at the top and the bottom as they’re both full-frame opening windows. The curtains will remain attached when the window is opened. The windows both tilt forward or open wide. Net curtain wire will allow us to push the single half curtain to one side or leave it pulled across.
The big window will just have the wire along the top with an extra hook in the middle to help with the weight.
There are 2 full glass doors that will also have the double wire treatment, top and bottom, with a tieback in the middle for during the day that we can undo at night.
The other window’s easy and will have a blind in the alcove.
I’ll probably do a before-and-after picture as it sounds really complicated. I think the idea came from the back of my memory as our old family caravan had curtains on wire. They may not have had wire along the bottom as well, though.
We have 2 pairs of small curtains for the dormer window. I will cut one curtain in half for the 2 sides, which will leave a whole curtain left over, possibly for cushion covers or place mats or something. We also have a single pair of long curtains for the doors, one curtain per door. All of the curtains will need shortening.
Bathroom tidies
We went out looking for curtains, but we came back with bathroom tidies, matching soap dish, matching bath bar, and matching towel rail. The poet had already put a medicine cabinet on the wall and we also had portable furniture in storage, which was already in place.
Once the poet put everything on walls, and emptied a few more boxes, that was the bathroom complete. We still have to find somewhere to store the bathroom towels and face cloths. But the bathroom is finished.
Monday
We had a good productive weekend in the house, but Monday came around with the poet itching to do some more. So in between work, we both did what we could. He had a couple of meetings and I had to make a couple of important phone calls, which meant for the first time we were both talking in the joint office.
It was… interesting, with me sticking one finger in an ear and him putting his headphones on and taking them off again. I expect we’ll get used to it.
The office
Whenever we could, we emptied more boxes and the poet put more things on walls. We’re both having to do without a few things that we probably didn’t really need in the first place, but it’s looking nice and it seems to be working.
There’s still a way to go in the office, with notice boards still to go up and drawers to be organised and more boxes emptied. It’s workable, though, and that’s the main thing.
Work
The work I did around this included publicity flyers for the last 4 anthologies I’ve published as part of my publishing challenge, and publicity flyers for a Monkey Dust gig, following liaison with the venue, which is a new one for the band.
I also did some ghostwriting (yay!) as well as the marketing around yesterday’s publication. But moving into a new office is more time consuming than I can really afford at the moment, and that’s all I managed.
Today
This morning I was asked for another poster for Monkey Dust as well as availability for 2023 (there isn’t a lot left, actually). So while I was in there making another poster for them, I decided to just do them to the end of the year, and I even created a Christmas logo for their Christmas gig.
What do you think?
I finally got around to creating my new month wordcount spreadsheet, and then it was wall-to-wall ghostwriting, and it will continue to be for the rest of the day and no doubt into the night.
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