Wednesday 29 November 2023: The year has flown

And just like that, November was almost over. It’s my November wrap-up post tomorrow, so this is the last post before the December run. I can’t believe how quickly the year has flown, and yet November seemed to drag and drag. Until yesterday when I started today’s post. Then it was, like, Wow! Where did November go?

Time was spent yesterday on the month’s wrap-up as well as starting December planning. I did a lot more deleting on Facebook and Twitter, removing another month of posts and a month of ‘activity’ on FB, and another month of posts and a month of ‘likes’ from Twitter. I’ve also started to remove people on Twitter.

I did some planning work for the Nettie Campbell cosy mysteries. The first of these stories is The Secret of Whitehorse Farm and as I need that story to be written in time for the January edition of Words Worth Reading, I also created the cover for the magazine. I already have the covers for this fun series of cosies, so it was just a case of adapting the first to match the style of the October cover of Words Worth Reading.

That’s not as easy as it sounds, because I had to adapt the book cover image to fit the circle on the magazine cover image. Then I had to pick colours from the image that worked in both the colour and white. I’ve shared the book covers before, but here’s the magazine cover alongside the first of the book covers:

I would have liked to use the turquoise on the magazine cover too, but the corresponding coloured text was lost against a busier background. I think the dark brick red works, though. It looks a bit flat here, but the actual image does show relief on the block capital texts.

I’m worried that Nettie looks a bit ditzy here, and in the novella itself she’s more and more being called Janette anyway. But it’s a fun series and one I’ll probably only carry for three stories, or possibly five if any more ideas occur to me.

(Or four plus an omnibus…) (Or three novellas, a collection of short stories, and an omnibus…) (Can you see how [a] undecided I am. and [b] how my mind flits about?) (I have two more pictures of ‘Nettie’, so I can’t really go above five unless I get in touch with the artist, if I can identify them…)

The next thing I did was upload the next chapter of Diary of a Scaredy Cat to Substack. I’m not getting a great many paid views via Substack for this, but the book has started to sell again, so something has shifted there.

I was really annoyed when one of my recurring tasks didn’t recur itself on ClickUp again. They said they’d fixed this bug, but clearly they haven’t. I didn’t have time to start chasing them or logging calls again, but I will have to keep a close eye on things there. If it keeps up, I may be looking at going back to Asana… or finding another project management system that works. I mean, I pay for this one, so I expect it to work.

I finished drafting the November wrap-up post, waiting to see what else I can add to it today, and I started work on the Hello December post, beginning with the graphic. I had a look at the December and January calls for submissions, deciding to add 3 of them to the December plan. And then I created my word- and page-count spreadsheets for December. It’s nice to be a bit ahead on this for a change.

The poet called to let me know he was on his way home, but he was already stuck in traffic and said he’d call again when he was closer so I could put some jacket potatoes in the oven. That happened at 6:15pm, but I carried on working until 7pm.