Thursday 3 April 2025: Busy bee

3 April 2025 2 Comments writer at work 0 Likes 80 Views

Tuesday was such a busy day, I wanted to take it easier on Wednesday. But there were more jobs on the to-do list and one of them took longer than planned.

The day started with my dirty cuppa, over which I read a chapter of the current book I’m reading for NetGalley. I caught up on social media, but I didn’t have any posts to share as I was hoping WordPress would auto-post to BlueSky. It did, which is great. But that means I can’t use tags now. Ah well, for the extra time it frees up, even if tiny, it should be worth it.

There was a washload waiting to go out on the line and I put another washload through. I hung out the first load and fed the birds. I didn’t have to empty the dishwasher as there were so few items in there I hadn’t even turned it on. I did, however, continue to fill it again throughout the day.

I got my first 2 jobs of the day muddled up, starting with the book review instead of the proofreading. I’m glad I did, though, because it was the book review that took longer than I thought. I opened up the Scrivener file for articles and features, where there’s a folder for book reviews. This means I keep to the format. I opened up the book on my Kobo Clara Colour to see my notes. And I rattled of a short book review. I have to keep it short so it fits in an Instagram post without cutting the bottom off.

The plan was to schedule the book review to post on here in a few weeks, and it still will. But I have a Trello board for the book reviews, to remind me to do everything on the list, and it was easier to just post it everywhere else according to the checklist. But before I could start with NetGalley itself, I had to create the graphic.

So I opened up the mockup in PhotoPea then went in search of a suitable backdrop. When I was happy and had made the mockup, I saved it to my computer so I could open it in Canva and add the ‘book review’ words…and that’s when I discovered I’d already created a graphic for this book. Tut, tut. I’d wasted valuable time duplicating that work.

I posted it to NetGalley and NetGalley auto-posted it to Amazon, which saved me a step. I copied and pasted the review to Instagram and checked off the Trello card for those 3 places. I’d put the title of the book in italics, and neither of those places carried the italics over and they wouldn’t let me use italics either. So I had to go in and put inverted commas around the book title instead.

Next up was the blog, which was just another copy & paste, and this time it kept my formatting. But the stars go in a different place on the blog and I had to remove all the Instagram tags too. I added my tags to the post and scheduled it. That will auto-post to Goodreads, LinkedIn and BlueSky, so with just one post I’d covered 4 places. Again. But again, it meant I couldn’t tag the BlueSky post.

It was a bigger than expected job done, though, and I moved on to the proofreading. I changed the odd word here and there but was generally happy with the story. Then I moved the folder from ‘stories in progress’ while making sure there was a copy in the bookazine folder and in the ‘short tarot tales’ folder.

That was another tick off the list, but now it was time for my midday breakfast. With time to spare, I started today’s blog post. But that still left 3 more jobs to do. The Whitehorse Farm revisions were next, but by the end of the Pomodoro, I just wanted to carry on with it. I had to drag myself away in the end because I wanted to at least touch everything at least once.

The client edit was next, but I brought the washing in first and put it away. I cleared a few pages before returning to The Christmas Tree Mystery and pre-writing Act 2. I also added a few hundred words. Our polling cards arrived for the mayoral elections next month, but as we won’t be around, we need to apply for a postal vote.