Two days off

Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay

I worked at the weekend – again – but only so that I could at least have 2 days off this week with the poet. He had to go on another business trip first thing Wednesday morning, so I made sure I had Monday and Tuesday with him.

On Monday we chilled for a bit before we went out and did a bit of spontaneous shopping. On Tuesday, he worked on the gig list, a playlist for a private party Monkey Dust are doing at the weekend, and a new song of his own that he’s written.

While he did that, I sat down and planned my publishing schedule for the next year. Well, I started it.

The first thing I did was add in all of the quarterly Words Worth Readings, because that’s now my new starting point, and I worked backwards. I allocated some archive stories and tentatively added a novella or two here and there, and I built in all of the writers’ guides I’m currently working on.

It’s given me something to work to and I can see where I need the new short stories as well as when to finish writing the next novel (The Beast Within is next). The schedule is full for November, and there are clusters around each of the Words Worth Readings.

But there are big gaps and little gaps, and holidays won’t come into it because I’ll be publishing in advance again. I’ve done that for November and it really does take the pressure off, doing it in advance.

On Tuesday, my paperback copy of Words Worth Reading Issue 1 arrived, and I’m quite pleased with it. I think the layout needs tweaking slightly, and maybe the ‘exclusive’ stamp on the front cover. But generally, it looks nice.

It wasn’t supposed to be here until the end of November, so they’ve done really well, and it was printed in Milton Keynes, England, so that’s good too.

When the poet got up on Wednesday at stupid o’clock I actually turned my alarm off, because I didn’t think I’d feel anything like getting up at 8am. However, at 7:50am I was sat up in bed anyway, doing my social hour on the phone. And that gave me a bit more wiggle room when I got to my desk.

I spent the morning doing my tax return. Every year I tell myself I’m going to do it as I go along, and every year I end up doing it in about two hours flat. This time, the income was all already done (must have needed that for something), and half the expenditure. Took me longer to file the thing online than it did to calculate it all.

I wanted to do some more NaNo prep, but I ran out of time and was then distracted by the arrival of a new Fire-sized tablet to replace the Amazon Fire 7″. I use this for reading – books and magazines – and the old Fire, while I loved it, just wasn’t doing the job anymore.

It had slowed right down, despite doing a complete reset, none of the apps are ever updated by the developers, you can only use certain apps and even then they’re watered down versions of other apps, and Amazon have made it so you can no longer upload your own music or films or even non-Kindle books. You have to buy everything from them.

So when the battery started to run out of juice at a rate of knots, I decided it was time to replace it. It was a gift off the poet a few years ago, and I think my version is obsolete now. And once again, it’s a gift off the poet. 😊

I’ll see if they’ll do me a part-ex on a new Paperwhite, but then I’ll have a spare Paperwhite too. I’ll see.

I spent dinner and some of the afternoon playing with the new tablet, setting it up, getting to know it. I don’t think it’s going to be a great tablet, but I do think the reader will be better than the Fire. I can also get the Kobo app and Google books if I want.

I started one client job yesterday and it took up the rest of the day. The file had arrived as a pdf and I converted it to Word. The hard copy edit was fine, but the electronic file had a mind of its own.

If I did something, the cursor jumped to the end of the page. Many words had run together, but when I checked there was actually a space there. Other words looked spaced, but there were no spaces there. There were section breaks all over the place. It was taking me ages.

In the end, I converted the text to normal, but it stripped out all of the formatting. So then, aside from the screen edits, I also had to read it all through carefully again to try and catch the bolds and the italics.

It was a nightmare.

Then, when it was done, I wrote quite a long email to the author. I sent it off, and he acknowledged it almost immediately. But I didn’t switch the computer off until getting on for 10pm.

It was a long day and I slept in this morning. So we’re working from home today, i.e. not ‘walking to work’.

I have another client edit to sign off and some NaNo prep work. Then it’s back to ghostwriting.

The Halloween picture is because, well, it’s Halloween week and it looks like she’s off on her holidays. Even if it is only for two days.