Thursday 19 Jan 2023: Brrr!

Yesterday I managed to post a book review, so today is another two-day blog post.

Tuesday

After a few flurries of snow the day before, when we woke up on Tuesday it was blummin FREEZING. I really didn’t want to get out of bed and so I stayed there longer than usual catching up on social media, emails, blog posts, etc. The poet did really well. He forced himself to get up and out and off to work.

When I finally got to my desk, the People’s Friend writing hour coming to an end, so I jumped on and joined in with some of the questions for the next/last fifteen minutes. This brought me to midday. (Yes, that’s how late I was getting to my desk.)

I finally went in and updated the newsletter sign-up post with a new graphic that was the same as all the others on the home page of the blog. I had to search for the original graphic online (it was still there, but took a while), then I had to remove the old graphic, both from the post and from the featured section, and insert the new graphic. I updated it all and now all of the pictures on my home page are the same size again. (See! Here.) The OCD is so much happier with that now.

Next, I went into Canva and created the book review graphic for yesterday’s blog post. While I was there, they ‘presented’ me with a 500 designs GIF, which I shared to Facebook because, well it was a thing and it was a nice thing. I started on the book review, and when I was happy with it and had scheduled the post to publish yesterday, I then had to replicate it on several different sites, such as Medium and Substack. Then I had to go around collecting all of the links to add them to the main review on NetGalley. There are some I can’t do until it’s posted on here, but I did most of them, and then updated the reading long and my Trello card.

All of that actually took quite a long time and before I knew it the poet was on his way home and we had to get ready to go out for a family thing. I was really disappointed that I didn’t get very much else done, so I rejigged the diary so I could catch up on the priority stuff on Wednesday.

Wednesday

It was hardly any warmer on Wednesday. I had a lot of a faff, messing about with my Trello boards and updating it with all of the ghostwriting jobs so far. I had a chunk of book titles missing and when I went to find them, they weren’t in my backup folders either. I know where they all are, they’re on the little memory stick that stopped working with the laptop. Only I can’t find the little memory stick… So I went onto the job site and was able to download all of the missing files from there.

I shared yesterday’s book review on all the sites that have to wait until it’s already posted, and I gained another two followers on Post. Then I went into the Trello board for the NetGalley books and updated that, with new colour coding and new checklists.

The Click-Up project management system works great for planning and scheduling my workload, but it’s long and laborious to update things like the NetGalley books and the ghostwriting milestones on there. I’d love it if I could have a proper diary/calendar on Trello, but I have to upgrade for that and, from memory, I think it’s a bit pricey for what you get that isn’t already included in the free version.

Once I’d done all of that I had to do a midweek backup, just to make sure I had a copy of the latest data. I had to drag myself away from it all in the end and get on with the ghostwriting, and I ended up working late again.

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