Monday 25 November 2024: Publication day!

I was busy on Friday trying to catch up with everything. I wrote Friday’s blog, chose the picture, published it, then shared it. I did a quick 5-minute tech declutter. And I published another new Wordsworth Short.

After last week’s Wordsworth Short finally went through, I noticed they hadn’t refused to send it to Amazon, despite the story, The Kite Festival, already being published in Words Worth Reading Issue 1, as well as the original publication in a weekly magazine. So this time I didn’t think twice about sending this one to Amazon.

I made sure I was half ready for the reject to come in regarding length, but I already knew what my reply to their automatic email would be: ‘This is Book 35 in a series. Ajax told me to ignore any warnings and just reply to the email.’ Or words to that effect depending on what mood I’m in when/if it comes.

If it doesn’t come, then I was worrying for nothing. But I always think it’s better to expect setbacks like that, then they don’t come as so much of a shock.

I added a few more words to The Secret of Whitehorse Farm, and I came up with a 4-week plan for future stories in this Great Novella Challenge. I’ll spend one week pre-writing, 2 weeks writing, and one week polishing. 

It works out at around 2,000 – 2,500 words per day, and some of my chapters are 2,500 words or more. So long as the entire book is between 15,000 and 30,000 words, it qualifies. I don’t have any client work to do this month or next, so I should be able to hit these targets.

I had a bit of a play around on Plottr with the very short story for 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS. This is going towards 2 things, one is the 300-word story for December, the other is a 350-word story for a competition. I added the extra 50 word-section in the middle, which will probably just be another quick try/fail. 

By the time I’d finished the ‘rough’ outline, I had 927 words…Allowing for 7 extra words for title, byline and ‘the end’, that’s still 620 words over! If I couldn’t come up with 300 or 350 half-decent words out of that lot, I should give it all up.

The pest control people let me know that they’d be here at 9am on Saturday morning. But that was me done for the week. Although writing at the weekend wasn’t ruled out at this stage. I set the computer off for an update and called it a week.

We were up early on Saturday for the pest control chap, who was fairly punctual. A young deaf lad, he was a lip-reader. We didn’t know that though when the poet stood on the front doorstep calling out “Front door, mate. Front door!” when he went to the back door. But we got there in the end.

It’s rats in the roof, not squirrels, and some of the ‘evidence’ is quite old. So they’ve been up there before. He put some poison down and a trap and said he’d come back next week and again the week after, then he’d go around to see where they were getting in and block it up.

Once he’d gone, we did the shopping. First to the butcher, where the poet and the band’s drummer had a long chat about the poet’s voice. Then to Meadowhall to buy a warm coat for me and a pie funnel. We had a look in the record shop too, but there was nothing the poet fancied. We grabbed something to eat, had it in the car, and headed to the supermarket.

By the time we got home we were shattered, so we chilled in front of the telly for the rest of the evening.

On Sunday we were up early again. The poet put a chicken in his new slow cooker (it’s huge) (the slow cooker – and the chicken!), and we made a picnic. We went to visit the mother-in-law. Then we went for a walk to try out my new coat. We managed to dodge the rain, but it was peeing down by the time we got home. It was also already getting dark.

The plan was to plant up the pots, but we were both tired after clocking up lots of steps 2 days on the trot, and getting up relatively early (for us). We made a cherry pie for pudding and the poet started to fix something on his audio interface or the electrics or something. But when I looked at the garden bulbs, they were already sprouting inside their bags.

We’d had them a week already and were already quite late with planting them. So in the waning light, I decided to go out and just do it. Gosh, it was hard work. I can’t bend for long, or even stand for long, with my back and I had to keep sitting down in between planting layers of bulbs. The light completely went and the security light keeps going off, so I had to get a torch. It is so difficult holding a torch, holding a compost bag open, shovelling compost into pots, and making sure it’s not going all over the place in the dark.

I was almost done when I threw a bit of a strop. The poet stopped what he was doing, finished the job for me, and then between us we potted up the indoor daffodil bulbs and we sowed the sweet peas. The outside pots now have layers of daffodil bulbs, tulip bulbs and snowdrop bulbs. I hope we’re not too late, and I hope the squirrel doesn’t start digging them up. (‘Ooh, fresh earth…’)

He went back to finish what he was doing and to tidy up the office while I rested and stretched my back, and then we made tea. Emails started to come in from Draft2Digital. My short story had been accepted and was being published. Yay! Find it here…

The only jobs I have to do today are The Secret of Whitehorse Farm, the short story for 12 STORIES and the competition, and a new short story to brainstorm. At 2pm I’m at Dermatology again.