Wednesday 7 August 2024: A week away

On the Friday we broke up for our week away, I ended up stopping work 2 hours earlier than planned because campsite #1 called and asked us to make sure we got there before 8pm. If we didn’t get there by 8pm, we wouldn’t be able to get on the site as everyone finishes at 8pm. So everything stopped and we had a mad dash to get on the road.

I’d spent the morning frantically trying to finish the hard copy client edit so I could get it back to the author before we went. I didn’t do any other work because this was my main focus for the week, in actual fact. But the phone call meant I had to up sticks and pack my work away.

It’s a good job we did leave early, because the Friday afternoon traffic was already building up. We only had around 140 miles to drive, but stick a traffic jam in there, or an accident on the motorway, and you’re stuffed.

We arrived at the first campsite at around 6:30pm, so not bad in the end. And we settled quite quickly. I finished the client edit, but by the time I was able to connect to the site internet, it was getting on for 11:30pm. I fired it all off with a quick explanatory email, and we went to bed.

For the next week we were on holiday. We had 3 nights in Malvern, but we didn’t get any pictures other than the site picture. We had 2 nights in Minehead, Somerset, where we did get quite a few pictures. And we had 4 nights in Hereford, where I think we got a few more pictures.

I don’t yet have all of the photographs on my laptop, so I’m saving them (apart from the one above) and the actual holiday roundup for the newsletter, which should be coming out next Thursday.

If you’d like to see the pictures and you’re not already signed up for the newsletter, or if you removed yourself from the newsletter when Octopus sent the joining newsletter out to everyone again by accident (my apologies, but thanks to those who let me know and who hung in there!), then you can sign up here:

For the rest of you, it’s just work stuff on here again. 😄

Remember, though, you get a bonus short story with every newsletter, free access to every newsletter published so far, and free access to my fiction magazine, more of which below…

There will be other free and fun stuff too in the future, including the option to become a beta reader for the longer material. (Who could possibly resist?)

The author I sent the copy edit to replied on Monday, and pretty much told me off for working whilst on holiday, but she thanked me too, promising to have her responses to my queries back by Monday 4 August (my one day back at work in between trips). Her response arrived mid-week last week, but again she told me not to reply until we were home.

While I was away, the proofreader’s report came back for the other client edit. And before we went away, some additional material arrived for that job too. It wasn’t extra, it was something we were waiting for.

I had a really mad day on Monday, which was the only day I had in which to do any work. We also had a lot of washing to get washed and dried in order to bring some of it away with us again this week. And we had packing to do again. Much of the day, though, was spent looking at all of the short stories I published as part of my challenge in 2022/2023.

The organisation of this publishing challenge was very shoddy towards the end of the challenge, and I’d been a bit lax at updating my records. So I had to plough through the lot of them (around 40 short stories) to make sure I didn’t repeat any of them when I reboot my publishing schedule.

With the news coming in while we were away that people’s stories were appearing on Amazon and various other websites that they didn’t know about, it made it more clear than ever that traditional publishing, for my short stories at least, are a thing of the past for me.

I want to make sure that MY versions of MY stories are the FIRST versions that appear online anywhere. That way, I can’t be accused by robots of stealing any of my own work. I know we can respond to the emails, but it’s such a time-suck and so unnecessary, so long as I stick to my own publishing.

UK magazines grab all of your rights, or they assume exclusive rights the world over, or they pay abysmal rates, or any/all of the above. I fell out of love with most UK magazines a long time ago.

Probably when a retired fiction editor from a long-defunct magazine once told me that they’d rejected stories back in the 1980s just because the author used green letterheads. (My letterheads were green.)

I also found out from another fiction editor that her publisher blacklisted NUJ members. (I was in the NUJ – the National Union of Journalists.)

Then they started to CUT our pay, not even freeze it, some stopped paying all together, and THEN they started to take all rights.

Now I have friends who have their short fiction popping up all over the place it really is the final nail in the coffin. Whether it’s a pirate/AI scraping the stories off Readly or whether it’s the publisher sending the stories to these places before the authors can, I’m done.

Sithee bye, cocks.

BUT… it’s not the end of my short fiction. I’ll still write stories for 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS, I’ll still target those anthologies that pay royalties, and I’ll still write for those magazines (usually in America) that still pay decent rates and don’t steal your copyright.

And I’ll carry on learning and writing short stories for writing courses, because those assignments stretch and challenge me, and it’s often fun to try something different.

The biggest thing, though, is my own fiction magazine WORDS WORTH READING. This fell by the wayside (again!) when I didn’t manage to get January’s issue out, which in turn was due to me not finishing a long enough story in time to fill it.

I’m not even going to try and run out a long list of excuses. I didn’t do it and that’s that. My bad. Shame on me. But now? Now I need to get this thing up and running on a regular basis so I have an outlet for my short stories THE FIRST TIME THEY’RE PUBLISHED.

Once the short story or novella or novel serialisation has appeared in WORDS WORTH READING (MY publication), I’ll re-issue them first as standalones and then in collections. (Still MY publication.) And when the bots jump on them for already being published…? Oh, get ready.

So, once I’d sorted out the admin on the stories already published and the stories already written but awaiting polishing and publishing, I turned to the frequency of the magazine.

I don’t want to rush it. So Issue 1 (as the last one was republished and rebranded as Issue 0) should be out in October, regardless of whether or not I finish the long read. I’ll aim at February 2025 for Issue 2, June for Issue 3, and October for Issue 4. i.e. 4-monthly.

THEN, if all goes well, I’ll aim at January 2026 for Issue 5 and make it quarterly. I’d like to eventually reach publication every 2 months, but I think that’s pushing it a bit for now, as it means a LOT of writing and a LOT of finishing things.

Of course one day I *may* be able to consider a monthly. But I’m neither good enough nor quick enough to think about that for now.

The plan then is for each issue, apart from Issue 1 if I don’t finish the long read, to include the following:

• 3 brand-new short stories, including a series or serial episode
• 1 brand-new novella OR novelette
• 1 novel serialisation, in 4 parts
• 1 story from the archives

At the moment, that gives me to mid-September to finish THE HAUNTED HOUSE HOTEL and mid-January to finish THE SECRET OF WHITEHORSE FARM. (But as I say, if HAUNTED HOUSE isn’t finished in time, I’ll run without it.)

I’d like to alternate between Stevie Beck (HAUNTED HOUSE), Nettie Campbell (WHITEHORSE FARM) and Toni & Bart (my time travel duo) for the longer reads if I can, but I won’t hold a gun against my own head.

It also gives me to the end of next year to finish THE BEAST WITHIN, my second Marcie Craig novel. But I don’t want to take that one to the wire if I can help it as by the following issue I’ll need Part 1 of a new novel, which is likely to be CATCH THE RAINBOW.

And it gives me 4 months, at first, in which to write 3 brand-new short stories or series/serial episodes. But I have more than 40 stories to choose from for the archive story.

THE BEAST WITHIN is my writealong for PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR WRITERS, and as those first 2 books are, so far, my best sellers, I’ll be working on that too, but that won’t appear in the fiction magazine as a serialisation.

When EVERYTHING has been published by me first, in the magazine, as standalones, in a collection/boxed set, or in an anthology (first, or second if they use reprints), then I might sent it to MEDIUM and/or VOCAL, as my stories on those do crank up reads as well.

Then the pirates can see how far THEY get before the robots stop them.

(Well, I can dream…)

So that’s pretty much what I sorted out on Monday. I fired off quick emails to the editing client and the author, letting them know that everything had been received in time to come to Ireland with us. And then, at around 9:30pm, I finished work for the day.

It looked like we’d had 2 birds taken by the sparrowhawk while we were away and I was a bit worried about Scruffy Magpie. I had a chat with the next-door neighbour over the wall, and she said she hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the previous week.

While I was working into the evening, she (the neighbour) sent me a message: Scruffy Magpie was down having his tea! In our garden. Aww.