Thursday 12 September 2024: Networking

First job of the day yesterday was to work on the story for 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS and get it submitted.

I was right at the end of revising this first draft when I suddenly realised it could be a Stevie Beck/Horvale mystery. One thousand words isn’t really long enough for a Stevie Beck story, which is fortunate as I hadn’t finished the full draft anyway. So I made it Part 1 and went through changing all of the places to Horton Vale places.

It was a rough draft that I posted to the site, 1,000 of the just under 1,200 words I wrote. But at least I’d met this month’s deadline again. I might write Part 2 for the next one. The prompt was up, the word-count (1,800) and the deadline (9 October). If I can finish the story for that one, it will be a nice 3,000 words.

I went through all of my published stories on Medium and changed the link to my newsletter as the old link has expired (it went to SendInBlue and I’m with EmailOctopus now). Then I went through them all again and changed ‘my stories on Medium’ to a link to my new list.

Once both of those jobs were done, I chose 5 stories to pin to the top then uploaded yesterday’s blog post. I want to try and read 3 stories a day and comment on them until I start to get followers commenting again. Then I’ll visit those profiles and read and comment on their stories too.

I carried on uploading historic blog posts to BlueSky. I only had 10 historic days to do by the time I’d finished plus the most recent ones. Once that’s up to date, I’ll do the same with BlueSky – try and comment on 3 posts until followers are liking and commenting on mine, then I’ll visit those too. 

I never did this on Twitter really. I liked posts and I replied in conversations. But I didn’t make a point of trying to interact with more people. I do on Facebook, and I try to acknowledge every time a FB friend comments on a post, even if I disagree with them or they disagree with me. 

The next thing I did was go through 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS and comment on my 4 for last month and 4 for this month. I started with those who’d commented on my last story and then worked down the list to see who hadn’t had many comments on their story. 

Finally, I converted and backed up all of my latest ebooks to Google Play Books. Now I’ve found out how to download Kindle books to the Mac, and where to find them, it’s much easier. Time-consuming, but easier.

I finished work at 7pm.