Friday 5 May 2023: Another long weekend ahead

(Big sigh.) I had *another* late start yesterday, once again because of a disturbed night. The dog seems to have a bit of an upset stomach and he kept wanting to dash outside and eat grass. Thank goodness we live in a bungalow now, or I might have broken my neck carrying him downstairs. (He’s never been good going down stairs.)

I caught up on some sleep once the poet had gone to work. He woke me up when he called at about 9:30am and that’s when I thought I may as well get up. But it did mean another late start.

When I was making breakfast the dog was sick on the kitchen floor. Fortunately, it’s lino on the floor there, so easy to clean. Then, while I was finishing breakfast, he urgently demanded to go out again and this time he had the runs. He’s obviously eaten something that hasn’t agreed with him, which isn’t unusual for Rufus. I’m hoping it’s out of his system now.

Something terrible has happened at Instagram for desktop/laptop. It’s absolutely inundated with sponsored posts, ads, suggested posts. And when you’re all caught up, everything, Every, Single, Post, is spam. So that’s another one I won’t be using for much longer. Thank goodness I kept the blog going, and thank goodness I have a mailing list (or two) too.

Which reminds me, I didn’t share the Substack link on here yesterday, so here it is, and here’s the subscription button below:

At the moment the Substack newsletter is solely for writerly advice posts (many of which will have already appeared on here in some shape or form in any case) and the SendInBlue newsletter is for more personal news plus the bonus short story. Substack is easier to use than SendInBlue, though, so I’m wondering about merging them back again… I’ll see. I’ll keep the advice and personal separate for now.

I had a fiddle with the theme on here again the day before yesterday and I almost, ALMOST, changed it to a two-column blog with a right-hand sidebar again. This would be great for people who still use the desktop to read the blog, but it puts everything in a single column for the mobile version and in emails. So I resisted – for now. I usually give the blog a bit of a face-lift every January or so, but I might leave it a little longer even for now.

As I’m rebooting my Substack, the first thing I did yesterday was go in and schedule some posts. One should have auto-posted this morning, and one is scheduled for Monday morning. Then I remembered that I have a busy day today and wouldn’t be able to schedule any more. So I went in and added two more, one for Tuesday and one for Wednesday. These are free posts that already appear in some form on here but also on Medium and Vocal.

I ended up spending the entire day on Substack as I realised how I might be able to make it work a lot better than it has done so far. I also created a new Trello board so I have some reminder of what I’ve already posted, what I want to post, and when I want to post it. Using Trello reminded me that I had a board on there for Medium too. Last week I was wondering how to keep track of Medium and Vocal articles and short stories, and there it already was… (Duh!) 🥴

I’m still going to post free content, but I’m also going to post paid content. I’ll start the premium content by serialising the three writers’ guide books I already have out and take it from there. I have the option to archive the free posts after so many weeks, but these will still be available to paid subscribers. I’ve left that open for now while I see how it goes. And on the paid content, if anyone can’t wait for the entire book to be published, there will be a link to my Books2Read page.

What took a lot of the time was working out how to charge, how much to charge, and whether or not there’s the function for readers to continue for free as well as those who are prepared to pay for the extra content. (Hint: There is.) I think I got there in the end.

I’d noticed that some other people who use Substack had their pages set up like little websites with a different layout for posts and even page links along the top. So I had to find out how to make my Substack more interesting. I’ve tweaked it a bit, by making the publication the same name as this blog rather than just my name and by adding a few extra pages. Do give it a quick glance if you have chance and let me know what you think. (Here’s the link again.)

I’m going to have to send out a separate newsletter from there explaining to the existing subscribers what’s going on, and as mentioned above give them the option to unsubscribe if they don’t want this writing content. I’ll see if I can find time to do that today.

There was some admin I had to do for Mom’s probate. And the dog managed not to throw up again or need to urgently dash outside for the rest of the day. Fingers crossed he’s feeling a bit better.

We have another long weekend due to our king’s coronation tomorrow. The poet was talking about going fishing, but I might stay home and watch it. I do like the pomp, circumstance and ceremony but if it’s on all day I might get bored of watching it.

Whatever you’re doing this weekend, I hope it’s a goodun. I think we might be going out on Sunday or Monday.

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