Breathe a little

Hatfield Moor (© Ian Wordsworth, 2020)

I’m starting to run out of pictures from our Hatfield Moor trip, so we’ll have to go out again and get some more.

Fortunately, we have the last of our long weekends for the year coming up. If the weather is as sunny as it is today, the poet might finally get the autumn colours he’s after.

I finished the ghostwriting gig. I took it to the wire, with the bonus short story. But the actual novel was delivered the day before deadline.

The novel came in at exactly 60,000 words (in around 7 weeks), and the short story ran to just under 3,000 words (in a couple of hours).

Then came the bad news … he wanted a blurb too. As well as suggested titles.

I managed a few titles, but blurbs do not come easily to me. I gave it a go, though, and he didn’t complain about any of the titles. However, he did want a more glorified blurb, and he sent me some guidelines to help.

Today, I keep opening the guidelines and staring at them, then staring at my original blurb … and then closing it all down again and doing something else.

I have all day today to come up with this blurb. I’ll do it, but it won’t be easy.

The India client also had an article ready for me to edit this morning. And then the Hong Kong client sent the December magazine to proofread as a rush job. Or half of it. The other half is coming in tomorrow …

… but we’re having a 4-day weekend this week, and tomorrow I already have appointments in.

I’ll do my best. Although I don’t usually work at weekends, or evenings if I can help it, I will do for existing clients when there’s a genuine emergency – if I can. And I try to ‘can’, otherwise the guilt will sit heavily on me for the whole weekend.

Today I also want to re-open the file for The Beast Within. This is my NaNoWriMo project this year and it’s been sorely neglected so far.

Because it’s my own writing, though, the poet won’t mind me having a bit of a dabble when we’re supposed to be on holiday. And anyway, I can take it with us if we go out and work on it on the notebook. (The laptop is too heavy.)

The new editing interface at WordPress is having a proper hissy fit at the moment. I presume they’ve been ‘improving it’ behind the scenes and having a tinker. I can’t preview it properly in Opera and it doesn’t always work in Edge.

I’ve reported it, and we’ve tried to work through it, but it’s still not right yet.

My first appointment tomorrow is a telephone dental consultation. I have to wait in between 9am and 2pm, so if the call doesn’t come in early, at least I can work on the proofreading then. The triage nurse will probably want me to go in, though, so I have to be on standby for that.

The painkillers and anti-inflammatories have been doing their job, but I’ve been eating them for several days now.  The nurse that I spoke to expects me to have antibiotics, and a dentist will need to see me before they prescribe those.

If I’m at my desk for any length of time tomorrow, I’ll probably post another blog. But if not, have a great weekend!