Tuesday 7 January 2025: A good start

I packed a lot into the last 2 days of the week last week, and I packed a bit into the weekend as well.

Saturday

I was determined to have time off on Saturday after working hard on Thursday and Friday, but twice I had to stop myself going to get some work to do. Instead, I played games and read (I read one book in 2 days, which is a rarity for me at the moment). We also went out and did the shopping and visited family while we were out.

The rest of Saturday was spent looking for snow. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know how thick it would be or for how long.

Sunday

The snow started at about 6pm on Saturday. And it didn’t stop until Sunday morning. We had a lovely thick covering, but it was wet and instead of freezing, the water in the bird drinkers and bath was slushy. So it wasn’t that cold and we didn’t expect it to last.

I went out twice to feed the birds, and I made an apple crumble for our pudding on Sunday (and Monday, and Tuesday). Then I started to make a plan to update my backlist of books, bring them up to date, make sure I’m charging the right amount. I also want to make them available in a more logical order.

I’m going to start by unpublishing the Twee Tales collections and republishing those, but I’m deleting the extra stories in Twee Tales More. I do like the covers, though, so I don’t know whether or not to keep those as they are or choose another set of watercolours. I’m leaving the Wordsworth Shorts collections and the existing themed collections of five as those are okay and doing well. 

But I’m republishing the Flash Fiction collections so that they reflect the order the flash fiction standalone stories were published in.

I don’t know whether to remove the entire back-catalogue of standalone short stories completely (Wordsworth Shorts and Wordsworth Flash Fiction), or republish those in the more logical order mentioned above. Or just leave them as they are but with updated front and back matter. Making changes alters the publication date anyway, so perhaps I should just make those changes in the new order…

I now have three very very short flash fiction stories, two of which already appear in the existing flash fiction collections. I want to take those two out of the regular flash fiction collections and put them towards a collection of, say, 50 or 100 very very short flash fiction stories. I can’t use the third one yet, though, as I want to enter it into a competition in November first. 

So the jury’s still out on the regular and flash fiction short stories.

With me doing the great novella challenge, I’ve been looking at the order of writing and publishing the novellas/novelettes. Some of those I’ve floated as possibles are standalones, but several of them belong to series. I want to release the series books one after the other

Finally, with the existing back-catalogue, I want to re-order the content so that the newsletter sign-up call to action is right after the end of the story/stories rather than several pages later. Kindle tends to throw their ‘other books you may like’ right at the end, before the back matter, and I want readers to see my newsletter sign-up first. 

I want to move the Draft2Digital-generated ‘also by’ to the end of the books too and remove my own, so I don’t have to keep going in and updating those every time I publish a new book. Once I have the series (plural) established, I’ll include a link for those instead that will go to a page on the website. That way I’ll only have to update the website page instead of having to go back and change all of the published books every time.

I spotted a couple of mistakes in the back matter of The City of Glasgow, which was published before Christmas, and I don’t want that to happen again.

Assignment 1 of the WMG Publishing Space Opera Workshop landed, so I collected that and jotted some notes down. I also did some initial research into space opera in general and I bought one anthology (on my Kobo!), 1 novel (I made a mistake with that one and only checked Google Play and Amazon for the cheaper price; it wasn’t even on Google Play so I auto-bought it on Kindle, then kicked myself for not checking Kobo first), and a novella. 

The other novel is one I already had and I just side-loaded that onto the Kobo. There was a second anthology of short stories too, but the review slated it. I won’t have time to read them all in time anyway, so I didn’t see the point in buying one that I already suspected might not suit me.

I added the space opera assignment tasks to my TickTick, on my tablet. I tried to log in to Teachable on my phone. I got into the WMG Publishing Teachable eventually, but couldn’t get into the Indie Writer’s Workshop (cosy mystery). I sent an email to the owner of the latter, and then finally called it a weekend.

Monday

We had another snow-dump Sunday night/Monday morning, which surprised me. It was a lot warmer than the day before, though, and just as wet. First job of the day was to go out and feed the birds but, again, the water was fine.

The owner of the Indie Writer’s Workshop came back to me overnight, and between us we tried to sort it out. She could see that I’d logged on 3 hours earlier, but I hadn’t – unless she could see the WMG Publishing one. I tried again from the desktop and had no problems whatsoever. I tried again on my phone and still got access denied. 

It may be that I was logged in already on the desktop, or it may be a glitch. Either way, we’re leaving it for now, but she’s offered to change my password at her end if it turns out I’ve been hacked. If it continues to play up, then it may be an email to Teachable.

Monday was publication day for Take Your Pick. So first job of the day was sharing the blog post to BlueSky, Facebook and Medium, and I shared the graphic on Instagram. 

I changed a couple of book covers on Canva, collected some artwork, and changed the cover of Words Worth Reading Issue 2 on Affinity. Because I was able to spend more time on The Old Annexe in the end, I decided that would be the feature novelette in the bookazine for January instead of Whitehorse Farm, which needs a lot more work. As it’s a Stevie Beck story, I also decided on the order to release the first few of those, and I brought a couple of the later ones forward.

Then I decided on the order to release the Nettie Campbell novellas, and that in turn dictated the order in which to work on them. So that meant I had to rejig both the magazine folder on the computer and the Nettie Campbell folder. 

I started today’s blog post. 

I started the pre-writing for the next novelette in the great novella challenge, Fallen Angel. This will be written in three 5,000-word standalone parts to make the entire 15,000-word novelette, but it can then be broken into three and each standalone drip-released after they’ve appeared in the bookazine. When they’ve been in three bookazines, and when three instalments have been released over three weeks, then they can be bundled back together and released as a collection.

I played with the order of writing short stories on TickTick, deciding to try and get one done and dusted in a week before it goes into ‘cooling’. This has really helped with the 12 Stories in 12 Months, as those are due on a Wednesday and a mid-week submission date really messed with my 5-stories-across-5-weeks schedule. Now I can write the 12 Stories attempt in one go, the week before it’s due. 

I also brought forward Project Management for Writers: Gate 3. This series is one of my biggest sellers and I’d like to finish the set this year if possible. That means I’ll also have The Beast Within a lot further along too, as that’s my writealong for the project management books. And yes, there will be an omnibus edition of the project management books that includes The Beast Within as a bonus as well as it being available as a standalone.

I started to revise Killer Queen, but didn’t finish that job. It needs a few more hundred words adding to make it work properly and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I thought it only needed proofreading, but there’s a chunk missing from the storyline. I was able to check the existing 2,500 words and add a few more here and there, but it’s gone back into the cooler for now.

Next job was duplicating the Hello January post ready for the January Wrap-up and ticking off things I do as I go along.

I proof-read The Weather Can Be Murder, formatted it, and inserted it into the file for Words Worth Reading Issue 2. I’m working on something towards the bookazine every day so that it’s published before the end of January. Then I tidied up a few more of my folders, getting rid of duplicated material.

By the end of the day I was shattered. I still had brainstorming to do for the space opera course next week, but I’m not beating myself up over this one. At the very least I’ll watch the videos and join in with the exercises. If I also manage 3 assignments, then that’s great. 

I already know I probably won’t have time to read all of the material I have. I should have looked in November to see if the reading list was there then, but I completely forgot about it and I didn’t receive an email. So I’ll do it if I can fit it all in, and I won’t be too hard on myself if I can’t.

Last jobs of the day, then: 

• finish and schedule today’s blog post (and select an image)
• update 12-project spreadsheet with today’s word-count