Friday 16 August 2024: Up to my neck in pictures

Oh, my goodness! I’ve only gone and chosen an image by the founder of Pixabay himself! 😮

The day started quite well yesterday. The plan was to finally send out a newsletter, but before I could do that I had to sift through all of the poet’s pictures from our recent holiday and choose the ones I wanted to use…Easier said than done, as it happens.

I found his hard drive no problem. But there are hundreds – thousands of photographs on there, all neatly categorised by location and date. But could I find ‘Minehead’ or ‘Somerset’? Could I heck as like.

‘Hereford’ and ‘Ledbury’ were there, both for ‘2024’, so I grabbed those first and transferred them all to my laptop. I then wasted possibly a full 2 hours, maybe more, looking for those pesky Somerset pictures. And then I remembered…the Somerset pictures were already on my phone! He didn’t take his camera on our walk into Minehead, and we both shared what pictures we did take on each other’s phones.

Duh!

So I connected my phone and collected the Somerset pictures too. While I was doing that, I grabbed the gardening pictures as well from the weekend.

As I’d already used up so many Pomodoros doing just that one thing, I had to step away from the newsletter and turn to the client proofreading job. Only I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole again. Not a research rabbit hole, nor a ranting rabbit hole, but a rabbit hole all the same.

Because of the current uproar in womag publishing, I decided that I really needed to get the stories I’ve recently had published in that particular market published in my own right, so that mine are the ‘first’ and, hopefully, the best value for money. The way I want to do that from this point forward is to put them in the bookazine first and then release them as standalones and then in collections.

And that meant I had to look at WORDS WORTH READING Issue 1, which will now be out before October – definitely, as it’s already almost done. Because I want to get this out very quickly, I’m going without the complete novella for this issue. Instead, I’m replacing it with more short stories. It will be shorter than Issue Zero, and subsequent issues should also be longer too. But, for me, I needed to sort it quickly.

I selected all of the stories I want to feature in this issue, which are all already written. But I then had to decide which one went on the cover. And I had to create covers for those stories recently published that I didn’t already have covers for.

At first I went into Affinity to see if I could make the bookazine cover there, and I got a bit lost looking at some guidance videos that unfortunately refer to Affinity 1, not Affinity 2. Then I went into Canva to see if I could do something quickly in there…and I ended up collecting ALL of my Wordsworth Shorts covers into one file instead of having them dotted about my Home screen.

Reader, there are 55 of these covers all together, and that doesn’t include the Collections covers or the Flash Fiction covers. Fortunately, the Flash Fiction individual covers are all already in one file. The Collections covers aren’t. But by the time I’d moved all of those covers into one file and created new covers where necessary, the day was over.

I’d say it was a waste of a day, but it wasn’t because I was able to quickly rattle off the Our Garden This Week blog this morning (you can see it here) and the covers are now already there for the bookazine. I just have to create the cover for the bookazine itself and then upload the remaining stories. And before that, I have to decide which one will go on the cover.

Other work I have to catch up on today includes the proofreading job and the newsletter. I *may* also have to side-line THE HAUNTED HOUSE HOTEL in favour of THE SECRET OF WHITEHORSE FARM. The latter is already on the cover of the next WORDS WORTH READING bookazine, and the former won’t be topical if I get the bookazine out early. But let’s see.

We have an empty weekend ahead, so once we’ve done the shopping and probably visited family, we may get in the garden again.

Have a good one!