Tuesday 10 September 2024: Bonus work time

I had bonus work time Monday morning as before I’d even got out of bed there was a text message from my dentist saying the hygienist was poorly and could I call them to rearrange my appointment. They gave me a quick phone call as well, but I said I’d have to call them back when I had my diary in front of me.

My first job of the day was catching up with emails and blog posts/blog reading/blog commenting. Then I had to rearrange the day because I’d brought a load of outstanding jobs over from last week and there were far too many items for the number of slots in my diary. I spread them out a bit better and called the dentist back to rearrange that appointment. They gave me the same appointment they’d cancelled and brought forward to yesterday’s! Made a right mess of my diary!

I quickly rattled off a bog post for yesterday and had to go in search of the photograph with which I wanted to illustrate it. My Mac isn’t liking the external hard drive very much because it’s been configured for Windows, and I’m having to delve deeply in my archives to find folders to copy over to the Mac. This in turn is filling up the storage on my Mac. I really need to get a new external hard drive dedicated to the Mac so I can back my work up. I don’t like using the cloud, but Apple does. Therefore, it seems to be much simpler to just send everything there. But I don’t want to and I’m not going to.

Monkey Dust admin was next. I already had a poster for the next venue, at the end of this month, because the venue made it. Theirs are better than mine so I used it to create the event on FB. I opened up Affinity to start work on the poster for the next venue, but it seems the fonts haven’t carried over from the Windows version to the Mac version, and they’re not available either. So I had to use an alternative that looks like the old fonts. 

I created the poster for the next venue after the September one but they’ve always had cover fees on the door and I don’t know whether they’re doing that again this year. Whenever I’ve sent them just the poster, they’ve asked me to do it again with the cover fee on. This time I’ve asked them if there’s a cover fee before releasing the poster. I won’t make the event either until I know if they’re charging on the door. Searching for the posters and the fonts took a huge chunk out of my day so I stepped away from that job for now.

I broke for something to eat and caught up on the gossip on social media. I’m now having a bit of a gut feeling that we’re about to lose another short story market here in the UK. Or in the near future. They stopped asking for serials several months ago and now they’re no longer publishing their monthly specials. Recently too, they’ve been slow replying to writers regarding acceptances and they stopped replying with rejections a long time ago. They’re still asking for the novellas, which their sister title has started flogging to death all over the internet. Perhaps they’re planning on doing the same with these longer reads…

I’ve already decided not to work for this particular publisher due to their rights-grabbing shenanigans and complete disregard for their contributors, but it will still be a severe blow to quite a few of my other writer friends. 

Three (yes, 3) opportunities dropped into my mail box for short story submissions. They don’t pay a huge deal, but they don’t grab all of our rights either. In fact, they only take those very old-school (and quite right in my opinion) first serial rights. 

• one is 1,500 – 15,000 words, but due on 15 September
• one is <5,500 words, and due on 20 October
• one is 500 – 3,000 words, and open year-round

I already have one that will definitely suit the first one’s requirement, so I’ll bring that one forward on the power board and see if I can improve it before the deadline date. And I have 9 others also in Cooling that might be suitable for the other two.

I peeled away from all of this to do this week’s diary. I didn’t do it at all last week and I was later doing it the week before. Both weeks I felt very uncomfortable having to turn to TickTick to see what I was doing that day as not everything is on there yet. So this week I wanted to make sure the diary at least was completed, but I decided to start doing it in pencil again. The colours are very nice (green for my work, blue for client work, black for appointments, and red for deadlines), but when people change my mind for me it makes a mess of my diary.

I stopped using pencil and started using ink because it was too easy to move everything along. I can do that on TickTick now before committing to my diary, but I’ll still go back to pencil because too many things have been changed lately.

I went in search of the story I think I might send off this week and installed it into one of my new directories on the Mac. Then I proofed the plates for the client edit and sent that back to the client. Again, I had to grab them from the hard drive and save them to the new computer before I could work on them. 

Next up, a quick look at CATCH THE RAINBOW. The poet had already finished work so I was able to ask him to help me get the big, heavy box down from the top of his wardrobe. I located the Scrivener file for the project, delighted to see that I already had just under 27,000 words in there. I decided to do a quick read-through first before adding too many to that total. I got stuck in a Scrivener for Mac loop, though, couldn’t find what I wanted, and logged a question in the forum.

I finalised today’s blog, chose the image, and scheduled it to publish. Today I have a brand-new short story to write. Plan too, as I didn’t get around to it yesterday. Wish me luck!