Oh my gosh, I got a lot done on Friday morning. I was up with the poet and making phone calls to do all sorts of things. Order our repeat prescriptions to make sure we don’t run out while we’re away. Register with the local council for a postal vote for both of us in the upcoming mayoral elections. Arrange a follow-up appointment with Dermatology. Cancel a dental appointment in May.
It’s unlikely our postal voting forms will arrive before we go away, but if they do, then at least we can still vote. The dermatology appointment is for mid-July! And I couldn’t rearrange the dental appointment because I need to check I have a lift, as it’s an extraction and a filling.
I also put some washing through and hung some washing out, I topped up the bird baths and watered the patio pots, I cancelled our milk delivery well in advance, and I ordered 2 packets of inter-dental brushes we can only usually buy online or from the dentist. By the time I hit my desk I felt as though I’d done a full day’s work!
I forgot to mention that on Thursday, after I hit several brick formatting walls with the bookazine, I had a bit of a brain murmur. I was fannying around with it in LibreOffice Writer. What I should have been doing was playing with it in Scrivener. But when I went in search of said Scrivener file, I didn’t have one for the bookazine.
What? How can this be?
Soon mended. I just created a Scrivener file, copied and pasted everything into their own text documents, and off I went. Easy peasy. The formatting is done in one slick movement and I can easily move things around and add or hide documents. I don’t understand why I didn’t already have one!
I replied to the Kobo support reply regarding not being able to import the second Ellery Queen magazine to the app, pointing out that if Kindle and Google can do it, then surely Kobo can. And I shared 2 free-book-Friday posts on Facebook. I tried to open both free books on the Kobo and couldn’t, so I made comments on both original posts saying what a shame it was I couldn’t read their lovely books on the Kobo. But when I searched anyway, I found one of the books for free on Kobo and Google. So I removed my comment from that original post and shared the 2 links on my post.
The next thing was to add the epub files to my epub directories on the computer, but they were in such a mess I had to go through and make sure all the epub files on there were indeed on both Kobo and Google Play. (Apart from the one that’s Kindle-tied.) It took me a good couple of hours to get them all tidied up. But at least the Kobo and Google Play are now both fully loaded with everything I currently might want to read on there, either anyway or when we go away.
The Kobo goes into the ‘fun bag’ I take with us whenever we go away, along with my Samsung tablet (for playing downloaded games or online games when we have a signal, and for reading downloaded magazines and newspapers on Readly), some mini cross-stitch kits, and a puzzle book. I also have a packet of several balls of wool in case I fancy learning crochet, and some crochet hooks. I usually download crochet magazines to Readly on the tablet for that.
I take a work bag too, which contains the laptop computer, the crucial portable hard drive, at least 1 A5 notebook, and a pencil case. I’m also adding this time an A5 notebook for the Lady Mathilda stories. I think we have an A5 notebook already in the campervan cupboard for jotting down notes about where we’ve been. And we’ll have the NC500 guidebook, the NC500 map, and the National Trust handbook.
The poet’s ‘fun bag’ consists of his art stuff, his Kindle Paperwhite, and his photography/videography gear. Now we have a back box on the van, he’s taking a portable easel I bought him too. His work bag will have his laptop in, which he’ll need if he wants to edit pictures and videos while we’re away. We don’t need an internet connection for that.
The ‘fun bags’ go onto a ‘fun shelf’ in one of the cupboards. The work bags go into a secure compartment.
We also have a small television in the van, and a radio, but the TV does need a good signal. We can have no channels, 3 channels, or almost 100 channels. But the poet has Sky Go on his phone, and, I think, NetFlix. Although we’ll still need a signal for those…
Of course, we’re not even going yet, but this is such a big trip we want to make sure we’ve done as much as we can well in advance. The replacement sunshades arrived on Thursday. We have 2 transparent ones and two opaque ones.
Anyway, back to work. I was still a looooong way behind, so I moved a couple of things to next week and a few more to May. Then I resumed from where I left off on Thursday. Only this time, I didn’t have to tussle with formatting or book covers. Apart from one. The final instalment of Night Crawler is in Issue 3 and I want to see if I can replicate those covers in Affinity too. I simply may have to resist for now…
The Ace of Swords was first, for proofreading. Then it was The Easter Egg Hunt. I inserted the brand-new covers, then moved the stories to the ‘done’ folder in the bookazine directory and the ‘waiting to be published’ folder in the short stories directory. I added in the ‘also by…’ page that I’d started to leave out because Draft2Digital create their own. But if I’m going to be bypassing them in the future, the ‘also by…’ page needs to be up to date, or I’ll have another big job on my hands.
My last job of the day was proofreading the final instalment of Night Crawler, and I managed to impress myself with some of my own writing! It took a lot longer than the Whitehorse Farm story, though. Then I realised. The entire Whitehorse Farm story is just under 30,000 words, whereas each instalment of Night Crawler is around the 30,000-word mark. Once upon a time I used to write big stories. I got to the end of it, leaving just the credits page to do and, of course, A Mystery At Whitehorse Farm. I still have to finish revising this, and then I have to proofread it.
I did a weekly backup, updated and scheduled today’s blog post, and put everything away. We had another busy day at least during the weekend ahead, but I did hope I could come back to Whitehorse Farm.
Well done! Advance planning for a trip always makes it more enjoyable to actually GO on the trip!
Hopefully with less to worry about once we’re on the trip, we will enjoy it to the max!