Wednesday 2 April 2025: Grab a cuppa…

…this is a long one.

Friday

Friday seems such a long time ago now. I was still working on The Christmas Tree Mystery, but I had to finish work early as we were off out Friday night. We went into Sheffield where we had our favourite for tea – Pizza Express – before making our way across the short distance to the Crucible Theatre. They usually have the snooker on there, but this time we were going to see a play.

Neither of us knew anything about A Streetcar Named Desire or Tennessee Williams, so we went in completely green. The theatre isn’t very comfortable for periods of long sitting, but it is in the round, which is nice. There was also a rotating round stage where the 2 snooker tables usually go separated by a screen. We bought sweets and chocolate and a programme. 

While I do enjoy a trip to the theatre and I like to soak up the atmosphere, I wasn’t overawed by the play itself. I thought it was over-acted. But I can see why it’s considered one of the greatest plays ever written with all the different, and controversial, subject matter. The poet, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed it and loved every minute. The quick changes without curtains at the side were brilliant, and I think they used ‘smelly vision’ too. 

It was long enough for both of us, though, and we’re glad we saw it.

Saturday

We were up fairly early on Saturday because we were taking the poet’s mum out for a Mother’s Day meal and two of the kids were meeting us there. The table was booked for 3pm, and that gave us plenty of time to do what we had to. 

We got cash from a local supermarket cashpoint, bought our week’s meat from the butcher, picked up sunflower hearts and suet pieces for the garden birds from the bargain shop, and did our weekly shopping at another local supermarket. When we got home, we only had time to drop the shopping bags in the kitchen, put a few things in the fridge, and quickly get ready to go out.

The mother-in-law was next. We went to pick her up and we all arrived at the restaurant at the same time. It’s a fish restaurant. We all had starters. We all had mains. But only two of us had puddings. (Guess who – oink! oink!) We had a lovely long natter and were still there several hours later. But we decided we’d better move in case someone wanted our table. So we parted ways, took MiL back, and went home.

Both of us gave a big sigh as we remembered we still had to put all the shopping away. But we’d had a nice day and got a lot done. Although I didn’t manage any writing.

Our first milk delivery arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning. It was lovely to have proper fresh milk again, and they didn’t wake anyone up. Mind you, we have so much farm traffic through the village during the night, they’d probably have too much competition. 

Sunday

On Sunday, the poet went to get the campervan while I stared at a computer screen. I couldn’t really get going for some reason and instead moved back to something that was in a better mood to be written. I pushed The Christmas Tree Mystery to one side, and opened Catch the Rainbow.

I do feel a bit as though I cheated, but I’d written words for the Christmas story that counted towards the challenge, and I already had words written for the Rainbow story that didn’t. So I swapped them around and did a lot of jiggery pokery with the Rainbow story. 

Catch the Rainbow is planned to be 80,000–90,000 words in all and it consists of 3 Parts or Books. Some of Part 1 was written, some of Parts 2 and 3 were written too. But for me to get Part 1 to work as a standalone too, I had to do a lot of work with it. So that was a nice challenge.

While I worked on that, the poet fitted an arm rest onto the passenger seat in the campervan. There was already one, but I needed 2. So he bought me another one and fitted it on Sunday. He also bought a back box to go on the bicycle rack that came with the van, as we don’t have bikes. He adapted the rack and fitted the box. 

By the time he was ready to take the van back, I was ready for a break. So I went with him and we went to see his mum on the way. It was Mother’s Day on Sunday in the UK and we had already taken her for a meal, but we wanted to see her on the actual day too. So we did. Then we took the van back to storage and returned home.

I did a bit more work, but took the evening off.

Monday

I had a really good day on Monday. I started the day emptying the dishwasher, filling it up, hanging washing on the line, feeding the garden birds. I put another washload through, brought the washing on the line in, and the poet put some washing away and took the recycle bins out. He had a few meetings and he had work to do.

I shared Monday’s blog post to BlueSky, created a new poster for a Monkey Dust gig this weekend, created an event on Facebook for the gig, shared it, discovered I’d put the wrong month on the poster, corrected it, and changed out the images on the FB posts. 

I transferred April’s money over to the 2 accounts that have payments due, and I worked on April’s workload. I also set up a bit of a schedule for reviewing some of the backlog of books I have, targeting the review publication dates a bit closer to the actual publication dates of the books. 

Four of these books have already been read and notes made. I just have to write and schedule the actual reviews. They’ll appear towards the end of April. On top of these, I have 5 books to read, make notes on and review as well. Some of those, all being well, will also appear at the end of this month. The rest will appear in May. 

I wrote up Tuesday’s blog post and scheduled it, then I settled down to Catch the Rainbow. I finished it, at just under 30,000 words in all (remember, some were already written), and shared the graphic to social media. I finished work on Monday night at 11:30pm, which is considerably better than the 2am and 3am finishes of previous months.

Once he’d finished work for the day, the poet cut our 4 lawns and did some strimming. He had a shower and made our tea, all while I carried on working. I sent the novella off, and it was acknowledged about an hour later. Because I was up late, I heard Tuesday morning’s milk delivery (at 2:15am) and went and brought it in.

Tuesday

And so to yesterday. Another busy day, housework-wise, much the same as the day before. I hung washing out, fed the birds, emptied the dishwasher, and put another washload through. 

I shared Tuesday’s blog to BlueSky, then found out that Jetpack on WordPress now includes BlueSky in its automatic social settings, also included in the free package. It was too late to test Tuesday’s post, so I’m testing it on today’s instead. It’s a task that can come off the daily list now, even if it does only take a few seconds.

The Mac had an update ready, so I set that going while I worked on this week’s diary. I hadn’t got around to it last week and, anyway, I needed to sort out the April workload first. I selected Book 6 in the great novella challenge. It’s going to be the Christmas story, although I did toy with Book 2 of Catch the Rainbow. 

Then I sorted out what posts to write ahead and pre-schedule for while we’re on our roadtrip. The savvy among you, and regular readers, will probably notice when this happens. I had 2 days missing, though. So I also scheduled in 2 publications: The Mucky Duck and The Egg Thief. Both stories were in Words Worth Reading Issue 2, so they’re both ready for publication. 

I did think that Tuesday might have been a relaxed work day, after getting Book 5 of the great novella challenge done, but that already looks like a full day’s work for me and I still had plenty left to do. While it was still fresh in my mind, I rattled off the above. Then I finally turned to the day’s actual work.

Aside from the remaining housework chores, I only had 2 jobs to do: A Mystery at Whitehorse Farm revisions, and the client edit. Both were allocated 2 Pomodoro slots each. (Remember, my Pomodoros are 50 minutes with a 10-minute break for chores rather than 25 minutes with 5-minute breaks. Five-minute breaks are next to useless for me.)

I spent the Whitehorse Farm Pomodoros familiarising myself with the storyline. I created a new Scrivener master binder for the Nettie Campbell mysteries, and I copied the Book 1 folder from the great novella challenge binder to this new one. The old one will stay in the great novella binder. The one in the new binder is the one I’ll be editing.

As the green bin had already been emptied before the poet went to work, he brought that one in. Once the blue bin had been emptied, I went and brought that in and closed the gates. Then I brought the washing in off the line and was able to put that away as it was all nicely aired.

My final job of the day was the client edit before updating today’s blog post.

Today

Here are today’s jobs:

• proofread The Ace of Swords
• write book review #1
• create graphic for book review #1
• schedule book review #1 to post
• continue Whitehorse Farm revisions
• pre-write Act 2 for The Christmas Tree Mystery
• continue with client edit
• write and schedule tomorrow’s blog post
• household chores