Tuesday 11 June 2024: A turtle dove!

As ever, we had a nice weekend, starting with a successful Monkey Dust gig on Friday night. We had a lot of fun and the band itself filled the venue with friends and family. The venue were delighted, because apparently Fridays are a bit hit and miss crowd-wise and they were happy with the turnout.

The poet didn’t get back from Ireland until 4:05am on Friday morning, and with a gig as well, we were both quite tired on Saturday (I’d spent much of Thursday waiting for him or watching his flight and I didn’t sleep very well either). So we took it easy and only did the weekly shopping.

On Sunday, we took some things to the camper van and he cut up some foam for the crockery cupboard, to stop the rattling when we’re driving. We also took clean towels, old slippers, and a new mini-chest of drawers for putting ‘bits’ in.

I decided to ask him to make me some new Tarot cards from scratch. I love the Rider Waite ones I always use, but copyright’s a bit murky. While the original creator’s copyright definitely expired in 2021, apparently the company who copyrighted their version of the images in 1971 are still asking for reproduction license fees. They’re fine with the images being used on blogs and educational things, but not anything commercial. Like books.

So, to make sure, I asked the poet if he could design a new set. And he started straight away. He’s doing the 2 of wands first, as that story’s already written, then he might go back and do the ace of wands and the ace of cups, as those stories are already published. Changing the covers is easy once they’re already published.

I’d already decided my Halloween novelette is going to be the 5 of wands, and the short story I’m working on this week is going to be the 3 of wands.

He doesn’t think I need a picture of the playing card on the cover of the books. He thinks the titles will suffice. But I want a picture of the playing card on the covers. He’s also worried he may not necessarily have time to make them all. But he has a new art pad that connects to his laptop, and he seems to be getting on with that a lot better than he did the other one.

I think he’ll have time, though. I can use a regular card as a placeholder in my mandatory cover image (which I always like when I start to write something), and he’ll have the time it takes me to write it, from start to finish, to have the card ready. And we all know how long it can take me to write something. It will take even longer to publish it myself, and that, really, is what my covers are for.

While the stories do their rounds, he has that time too.

On Sunday afternoon he got a bit excited when he spotted an unusual, pretty bird under the bird table. It was a turtle dove, which he already knew was rare. We’ve found out since that there are only about 1,000 pairs of turtle doves in the UK and that they’re on a massive worldwide decline.

He snapped the bird for posterity and shared it to a Yorkshire birding page on Facebook, and he sent me one of his pictures to use on today’s blog. It is pretty, isn’t it? We’re hoping it will come back.

Last thing on Sunday I started my cosy anthology workshop with WMG Publishing. I watched the introduction to the course from Dean Smith and a welcome interview with the editor of the anthology, and I read the brief. On Monday morning, the workshop videos were live, so I watched those with my earphones in while the poet attended a couple of business meetings on Teams.

Jetpack support responded to my query, and told me how to fix it. (Time will tell if the subscription option is fixed.) And I chased my pension company #2 for my payment, which should have started in March.

I packed my back for our Durham trip and I wrote up today’s blog. The rest of the day was travelling and exploring. Back to normal tomorrow, but I’m hoping there will be free wi-fi at the hotel.