Monday 18 November 2024: Publication day!

I took 2 days off last week, but that didn’t necessarily mean I didn’t do any work.

Thursday morning we took the dog back to his humans. On the way home we went to the garden centre and bought:

• a chipping machine
• some spring-flowering bulbs
• 2 bags of compost
• new feet for 2 pots
• sweet pea seeds
• bio-degradeable pots
• a gravel tray
• a propagating lid
• (screenwash for the cars)

That all looks really exciting, doesn’t it? 

When we got back, the poet assembled and tried out the chipping machine while I went to do some writing work. I added words to The Secret of Whitehorse Farm (yay!) and I shared Diane’s Gig List.

The other thing I started to do was to go and grab old blog posts and put them in a Scrivener archive binder. As I grabbed each one, I deleted it online. Most of what I removed had already been put into draft form for Diary of a Freelance Writer. I think these are for Diary of a Cool Cat, but they may have been for Diary of a Pussycat, which has already been published.

Diary of a Cool Cat and Diary of a Tiger are in waiting. I have to go through and edit those and add in the weekly homework tasks. 

I scheduled The Kite Festival for publication, and that should have happened today. 

On Friday I didn’t get a lot of time to do anything, but I did touch The Secret of Whitehorse Farm and I added some more words to that. (Yay!) I had an error message from D2D saying The Kite Festival  was too short. I replied to that, saying this was Book 34 in the series and it was one of my longer Wordsworth Shorts.

Friday morning, the poet did some more pruning and chipping in the front garden while I did my work. D2D rejected my short story again. And this time they got a bit of a rant back, pointing out that I’ve published nearly 50 of these short stories since 2021, the last one of which was published only 2 weeks ago.

Friday afternoon we headed out to Leeds to see Darts. I’ve been a fan of Darts since I was at school (this is the doo-wop band, not the sport). We had something to eat at a burger bar and we had a drink in the club when we got there. 

The band were superb and everything I ever expected. We had a great night, met a few hardy fans who follow them everywhere, and headed home.

After a very late night, we had a very late start on Saturday. It was only a shopping day so didn’t matter too much. And we didn’t need to get to the butcher before they sold out of everything.

We had a lazy Sunday too. It was pouring down with ice-cold rain and that kind of stopped us going out in the garden. We went up to the camper van to put some things back and check it over. We think the battery might be running a bit flat so decided we’d see if we could take it out this coming weekend. There’s a Christmas market we’re interested in so we might go there.

The slow cooker was on, cooking a joint of beef, but we noticed it’s lost some of its feet. One of the lights has broken on it too. So while we were out we went to see if we could buy a new one. We didn’t see what we wanted, and when we got back the poet bought one online instead (I think). 

I made an Adam’s pudding (Eve’s pudding but made with pears), and we had another chilled evening, during which I had an apologetic email from D2D saying the length messages were errors and that they’d put my book through. In future, if I get stories rejected on length, I can just email them and they’ll fix it. That’s good to know, but not very helpful when I’m late to the party and don’t have a lot of time to argue the toss with them.

I did start to research alternatives, and I have found some. But for now, I’ll carry on with what I’ve been doing.

So…it’s publication day today! Yay! Follow the link!