I was at my desk on time, having caught up on social media and email over breakfast. I also read another two chapters of the NetGalley book and I shared the gig list post. But I did go out and change the dirty washing hanging on the line. Hopefully if Holly’s wandering in the vicinity, she’ll recognise the smell and work out how to come home.
Because she’s deaf, we’ve actually trained her to come in at night following the torch light. Unfortunately we can only do that in the dark, so it’s a night-time attempt for us.
First of all I wrote and posted this week’s garden post, which you can find here. Then I went over to Medium to duplicate the short story I posted on Vocal the day before. But the Medium website was down. I checked to see if there were any known issues. There weren’t, but a couple of UK members reported the same error I was getting. So I bobbed onto Twitter and reported it there.
I don’t know if they saw it or if they fixed it, but the next time I looked, the website was working again. So I copied and pasted The Complete Angler over, reformatted it, gave it a quick proofread, and submitted it. The publication I submitted it to isn’t one that auto-accepts stories. So now I wait for the owner to see it and decide if they want to use it or not.
I updated my record of submissions, ticked both jobs off in my diary and on ClickUp, and moved on.
Having written up today’s post thus far, I went to save it and noticed the save button was missing. I tried a few blah, blah, blahs, in case it had just auto-saved, but the button didn’t appear. So I copied everything I’d written so far and went out of the editing screen.
WordPress did at least warn me that I was leaving without saving, but I went anyway. Started a new post, pasted everything in, and voila! The save button reappeared. I’m now hoping this isn’t a sign of things to come…
I went to have a look at 12 Stories in 12 Months to see if my story had been approved yet. It had, but there were no comments yet. It’s a 1,200-word story when it needs to be a 2,000-word story to be suitable for the market I had in mind as I wrote it. Harvey’s Festival will now go into the machine to be revised, after it has cooled, and submitted at a later date.
Then I looked at the next prompt, which is for an 1,800-word story. At least I have a market already in mind for that length. I just have to try and come up with the right theme. I did a bit of research, to see if I was inspired. I wasn’t. Not yet. But you never know. Something might have slipped into the subconscious and be percolating nicely.
This one has to be finished on the Friday before submission. I can’t keep writing them on the hop on deadline day.
Diary of a Pussycat was next. I was going to stop at two chapters again, but at that rate it will take me another twelve days to finish it (after this session). That’s nearly two weeks, and I only have a week and a half before I publish this at the beginning of July. It’s already very, very late. About six years too late. And I have other books I want to publish too.
So I did an extra chapter, upping it to three chapters. If I maintain that, it will be finished much sooner. I added three lots of exercises too. This gave me a slightly more respectable 756 words added. Current tally = 42,484 words.
Over my dinner hour I listened to the next writing podcast in the series.
Then it was onto Catch the Rainbow. I think I’ve typed up to the end of the first Act (or Part – I work in Parts, four parts), and I added 773 words. Current tally = 15,639. That’s a bit short for a quarter of the book, but it gives me something solid to work with.
The poet finished work and on his way home he picked up sardines in oil so we could lay a stronger scent trail for the cat to find. We mixed it with chicken gravy and went and sploshed it all around the track at the back of our house and through the gate he’d opened the previous day.
I posted a Holly update on Facebook, thanking everyone for looking out for her. And I revised another online workshop.
Our new bed comes today, so we have to strip, dismantle and move the old bed, probably vacuum the bedroom, and then wait. They’re going to assemble the new bed for us but it will need making. It depends on what time it comes how much work I get done. I may just go and have a lie down on it.
Have a fab weekend.
Sign up for my newsletter
If you would like to receive my newsletter, please follow this link or use the form below to sign up and receive your first free short story.
Join my Substack
If you would like to join my Substack newsletter and receive writing tips and articles straight to your inbox, please follow this link or use the form below.
And don’t forget, you can unsubscribe at any time.
Wow, what a busy day. I hope Holly returns soon. That must be a worry. Your garden is lovely.
Thank you. We did like the house as soon as we saw it, but it was the garden that clinched it for us and even trumped a beautiful canal-side isolated cottage.
The neighbour with the ducks thinks she’s seen her twice and both times the cat’s run away. It’s possible her first sighting was Holly trying to get back into the garden. We’re not sure about the second sighting. It was a bit late at night and when we went to follow it up we saw a mostly black cat with white splodges rather than the other way around. At least the dirty laundry is getting aired before it’s washed!