The new blog regime doesn’t officially start until the new year. That doesn’t stop me from practising, though and, so far, I’ve done a spreadsheet planner reminding me to write certain blog posts for certain days.
Here’s how the blog post part is looking at the moment:
- Monday: write Tuesday’s blog post (might be Confessions of a Rebel Writer)
- Tuesday: write Wednesday’s weekly writing prompts
- Wednesday: write Thursday’s book review
- Thursday: write Friday’s Diary of a Tiger
- Friday: write Monday’s Publication Day/Publishing Challenge update
Tuesday’s Rebel Writer is actually a Vocal post, but I might take last week’s Vocal post, for example, and duplicate that over here.
Over on Medium, the only thing I have in at the moment is the Wednesday weekly writing prompts. I did promise some of the readers there more about (a) finding ideas, and (b) what to do with them when they’ve found them, and this also forms part of a writers’ guide I’m also working on (aside from the Diary of a Tiger).
I do, however, want to add shortform stories to the Medium schedule as well as short stories and out-and-about stories. I have publications lined up for each of my Medium stories, including the weekly writing prompts. But I need one more topic to make a 5-day schedule, and it needs to be freelance-related for the other publication I write for.
At the moment, I’m only writing the confessions stories for Vocal, so I’m only posting once a week. I’m taking advantage of a three month free membership and will re-evaluate everything when the free months are up. This is the Rebel Writer topic.
In preparation of starting date work again in the new year, I went over to my Edge browser and copied all of my date websites across to Opera. I also grabbed some editable Excel weekly calendars and had a play around to see if any were suitable.
I had two very long phone calls to make and while I hung on in the queues I did the copying over. By the time the calls were finished, it was time for me to start another scheduled job: brainstorm Red Roses, a short story for Words Worth Reading.
Unfortunately, I ran out of morning and didn’t have time to spend on The Fool, other than to see if a techie suggestion worked. (See below.)
For the rest of the day I had such plans, but I got embroiled with technology issues again.
I tried out the Scrivener fix one of the techies gave me the other day, and that worked, but I think the thing it’s fixing in the first place should also be fixed. But that was okay, and I replied to a couple of other posts on the forum.
Vocal didn’t react to my latest story within 24 hours and when I went in to query it in their support pages, support wouldn’t let me log in and wouldn’t send me an email to reset the password. I threw a comment up on Twitter, and within an hour the story was up, but I still didn’t have a reply to my support query.
Then I noticed I was having technological issues with the blog, and no matter what I did to fix it, it came bouncing back. I added my voice to a similar thing on the WordPress.org forum but, so far, no one’s come back to us.
In the end, I finished this post and scheduled it to post in one of the windows where everything seemed to be working. I think it’s a Jetpack plugin update bug, but there’s no one answering our queries.
While it *seemed* to be working, though, I backed quietly away. We shall see if it posts correctly today.
