Tuesday 27 August 2024: Working on the schedule

On Thursday night I went to bed with a good feeling: I didn’t have to get up to do any work for anyone else in the morning, only me. That felt soooooo liberating. We slept in, though. Both of us. It had taken the poet more than 5 hours to drive home the day before and he was feeling a bit weary. I had the beginnings of a head cold. And we slept in. Oh dear.

He had some work to do before going onto the first of many Teams meetings throughout the day. I had a leisurely breakfast, reading several chapters of DATE WITH MALICE. I like what the author has done with some of the scenes, but it did read much better when she kept the head-hopping to sections instead of paragraphs.

By the time you read this, I should have finished that story and I might have started Book 3 in the series, DATE WITH MYSTERY. Or I may have started STILL LIFE by Louise Penny. Find out tomorrow which one I picked.

When I got to my desk, the poet was in the middle of one of his meetings, so I very quietly did a 5-minute tech declutter. I collected some new books, shared some posts on Facebook, collected the Ireland pictures from the poet’s phone, formatted them, added the ones I wanted to use to the September newsletter, and I did my weekly backup. Lots of quiet stuff there – although my keyboard is loud when I’m typing.

Then I did another big job – another quiet one. I re-joined Duotrope and went through the topic calendar a month at a time, marking markets as ‘ignore’ if we weren’t a good fit. The ignore list criteria includes:

• no monetary payment (at all)
• payment below $20
• wrong demographic
• wrong location
• erotica (aka pornography)

It took a couple of hours to weed these out of what was on there. I didn’t choose any yet, though. I won’t have time to write any before the end of September, I don’t think. But for November onwards, I can add any that take my fancy to my schedule. I’ll have another pass at a later date and remove any that perform full rights grabs.

Then I checked a publisher website I originally found on Duotrope but it doesn’t seem to be on there any more. They’re still there, and I made a note of their current submission calls. They publish anthologies all year round, pay royalties, and return rights from publication day +1.

In between meetings, he made us something to eat while I updated the newsletter blog on Scrivener with what I already have for the September issue. Someone wrote to me with a Cadbury enquiry, so I dealt with that, found some information and wrote back to them. I wanted to write up the Ireland trip while it was still fresh in my mind and I toyed with doing that or doing something from my to-do list.

Ireland won! And I added 1,115 new words to my September newsletter. I don’t include the stories in the wordcount as those are already written and I just have to copy and paste them over. The new words are new words, though, and over a thousand isn’t bad for one day. At least the September newsletter is underway, and if anything happens to the mailing provider, it’s still in my Scrivener.

I decided on the topic for my 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS September challenge. TERRORS FROM THE TOYBOX isn’t exactly the upbeat tale I was thinking of, but ever since I saw an anthology by that name last year I’ve wanted to write a story for it. So I thought I’d give it a go. A mild horror in 1,000 words. I’m sure I can shoe-horn in the prompt.

Then I turned to TickTick to arrange this week’s schedule. It’s a 4-day week dedicated to just my own work. When I was happy with the schedule, I transferred it to this week’s diary. Mostly, it’s WORDS WORTH READING this week. But I also moved the short stories I didn’t finalise while I was working out the newsletter to this week as well, and I did some advance diary work too.

I’m a day behind this week due to the bank holiday on Monday, so the weekend catch-up will be here tomorrow.