Thursday 6 February 2025: Short n sweet

How can it be Thursday already?

So, I didn’t move into the living room in the end to do the client edit on Tuesday. I remembered (and saw) the reading chair in the office and thought I really ought to use that. The problem is, it’s in a bit of a dark corner at the moment. It’s okay for reading on a backlit reader, but rubbish for hard copy reading. 

And then I remembered the project (daylight) lamp we have tucked in another corner that my dad bought for us as a joint Christmas present one year. The trouble with this, though, was inaccessible electric sockets. I had to crawl around on the floor under my desk to rearrange the 2 trailing gang sockets I have down there until the cable from the project lamp just reached. I have it shining down over my left shoulder because I’m right-handed.

By the time I got it all set up, it was perfect, but also much later than when I started. Still, I forced myself to do a Pomodoro’s-worth and ended up clearing 11 pages. I’m always a bit slow to start because I keep going back to the beginning if I change my mind on consistency or spelling or capitalisation or something. But 11 pages was good and it got me over the starting hump. 

The poet experimented with a tuna pasta bake on the hop for tea, and it was delicious. We had the last of the rhubarb crumble with it, with ice cream.

Yesterday I had a bit of a housework morning. I fed the birds, folded a tumble-drier full of washing, folded all the washing on the 2 clothes horses, hung a washload up and put another load through, and I went round the house and emptied all of the bins. 

When I got to my desk, I shared yesterday’s blog post and I published a flash fiction short story. I have about 4 books already in the publishing machine before I put the brakes on. This is the first of those and it will be out on Monday. Happy Valentine has only ever been published in one anthology before.

I delisted all of the flash fiction collections. They only had 5 stories in each and that isn’t enough for a paperback hard copy. I don’t know whether to publish them in 10s, like the Wordsworth Shorts collections, or whether to publish 100 together. I don’t have 100 written yet, but most writers seem to publish very short fiction by the hundred.

Then I played with my covers files in Canva, putting all of the Wordsworth Shorts collections covers together in one file and all of the flash fiction collections covers in another, and I deleted the duplicates as they were all in their ones. Now they’re in groups of at least 12.

I finally got around to doing some writing and I added 1,688 words to The Haunted House Hotel. I was a bit stuck about getting all of the community introduced by the end of the first Act as well as the first body drop. Then I realised that the individual chapters didn’t have to consist of just 2 scenes, and also that I could introduce two characters in one scene. This is currently running at 3,867 words at the moment, and I’m about two-thirds of the way through Chapter 2.

I didn’t have time to do any editing, so I just rattled off today’s blog and called it a day. Tea was nearly ready and I hadn’t made a pudding to replace the one we’d finished the day before. But we had plenty in the store cupboard to be going on with.