Blummin technology!

Image by Yatheesh Gowda from Pixabay

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.