Diary of a Tiger: w/c Fri 4 Feb

Chapter 6: Week commencing Friday 4 February

Friday
February already, and not even the 1st of February but the 4th. Already this year is flying by.

I had a lot of ghostwriting to do again on Friday, but I was still suffering from the staring-at-a-blank-screen syndrome. So I had a bit of a trawl for images to illustrated the 10-story Wordsworth short story collections, and I had a play with covers for the Regency romances I want to write.

This is the kind of thing I’m thinking of for the Regencies (please note the excellent title…):

The covers all seem to be dropping into their own series, with each series linked in some way to the others, but still looking like their own series. I wasn’t overly happy with the covers for the Wordsworth collections, although I do like the new Twee Tales covers. So I chose some arty pictures again and I let them percolate.

Every time I came back to my work, however, instead of writing, I was thinking: I’ve lost two days this week, how can I catch up? I should have told myself to shut up and just get on with it. Not a lot was written. That meant I was going to have to work at the weekend again, although I did at least write around 250 words in the end. And that too, at least, warmed me up.

The Weekend
Saturday was shopping day, and shopping day is also meal plan day for the week and shopping list day. It’s amazing how long those last two things actually take.

When we got back from the supermarket, I sat down at my desk and opened everything up. The first thing I did was rejig my publishing challenge schedule as I’ve removed all of the stories from Medium now and that means I shouldn’t get flagged at Amazon.

If I had all the time in the world, this Amazon thing really, really wouldn’t bother me. But while I’m stupidly busy, it’s worth the effort to save me time in the long run – at the moment.

Next, I went and dug up all of the book covers I’d made for the ones that are staying as Wordsworth Shorts, found the image credit information, and put the topical stories back with the dates they need to go with.

Then, I chose the stories that are under 1,200 words that will go in the flash fiction collections, and I listed the ones that were already in the first flash fiction collection.

Canva was next, and I was updating the marketing flyers as well as settling on and creating those percolating book covers for twelve Wordsworth Collections. These consist of:

• ten short stories – Wordsworth Shorts 1 – 10
• ten short stories 2 – Wordsworth Shorts 11 – 20
• ten short stories 3 – Wordsworth Shorts 21 – 30
• ten short stories 4 – Wordsworth Shorts 31 – 40
• ten short stories 5 – Wordsworth Shorts 41 – 50
• ten short stories 6 – Wordsworth Shorts 51 – 60
• ten short stories 7 – Wordsworth Shorts 61 – 70
• ten short stories 8 – Wordsworth Shorts 71 – 80
• ten short stories 9 – Wordsworth Shorts 81 – 90
• ten short stories 10 – Wordsworth Shorts 91 – 100
• fifty short stories – Wordsworth Shorts 1 – 50
• fifty short stories 2 – Wordsworth Shorts 51 – 100
• 100 short stories – Wordsworth Shorts 1 – 100

At the moment, only the first two books are complete, chronologically (so far), but I have material for several still to be collated and formatted. I just wanted to find enough images with the same theme so that they all go together while also looking different. Plus, the subheadings are all different.

Here are the first three, the first two of which are already in the sidebar (because those are already on the publishing schedule):

I’ll go into more detail in the publication challenge posts.

Finally, I updated the sidebar on the blog with all of the latest graphics.

It took a couple of hours, but while I’m chuntering over what to ghostwrite for the two clients, it at least keeps me occupied. By the end of the day, though, I’d written one chapter and 3,057 words for GW2.

On Sunday, Monkey Dust, the poet’s indie-rock covers band, had a 4pm gig, so the day was cut in half as we had to leave the house at just after 1pm. He’s currently working on a few original songs that the band are going to learn and contribute to, then they’ll see if they can get a one-off gig playing those instead of the covers, or at least one set’s worth.

In the morning I had hoped to do some ghostwriting, but by the time we’d had breakfast and everything, it was already almost time for us to go out. I packed a picnic for us both, and I packed a work bag – including my lovely new lap top!

When we arrived at the venue I was going to sit and work in the car for a bit, while the band set-up. However, there was a snug in the building that wasn’t being used, so the poet asked if I could sit in there and work. The gaffer said yes, and off I went.

We got there at about 2pm and I worked until about 3:30pm before packing up and joining the band in the concert room. In that time I managed to ghostwrite 2,277 words.

Back home for about 7:30pm, we had pizza for our Sunday dinner. I was going to do some more work, but I was tired. So I called it a weekend.

Monday
On Monday, a new Wordsworth Short was published.

The Complete Angler is a story the poet inspired me to write. He’s a match angler like the main character in this story, but he doesn’t like this picture because it’s a carp set-up and not a match set-up. The magazine that accepted the story used an illustration of a fly-fisherwoman, which is completely different. But, to be honest, fly-fishing anglers made up the majority of the images that I found too.

You can find all of my books on the BUY MY BOOKS tab on the blog, or you can go to www.books2read.com/DianeWordsworth.

I didn’t write a publication challenge post on Monday because I was still raving busy with the ghostwriting. By the end of the working day, and at a reasonable time too, I’d finished the current submission (Chapters 19 to 21) and sent them off.

There are only six more chapters to write for this one at the moment, or two more submissions.

Tuesday
Overnight, the revisions came in for GW1 Book 8 Parts 2 and 3. I have a couple of extra scenes to write, one for each part probably, but first of all I had to complete and submit GW1 Book 8 Part 4, which was due on Wednesday.

I bobbed in and brought this blog post up to date, then went straight back in to wall to wall ghostwriting.

Wednesday
First thing Wednesday morning I made the mistake of reading a few articles on Medium. I’ve cancelled my membership there temporarily, so I was restricted to just three stories. I did find out how to read more stories (I read it on Medium, so not a secret from them), but I really should have just walked away.

Instead, I disappeared down a copyright rabbit hole and ended up (1) removing pictures of ‘recognisable people’ from all of my book cover images, and (2) writing to the places I get the pictures from to ask about their model release policy.

As a result, I’ve left the covers as they are, but I do still have alternatives already prepared in case the situation changes.

Payment for the GW2 instalment was authorised, the revisions were sent back to me, and the next part of the contract was activated by the client. I’ll be back on this one next week.

Then it was more ghostwriting for GW1 Book 8 Part 4 for the rest of the day.

Thursday 
I’d been thinking about what I want to do with both my Medium and my Vocal accounts, and I think I’m going to veer away from writing about writing. Instead, I’ve selected a couple of topics to write about and place in a few select publications (Medium) or communities (Vocal).

The two topics at the moment are:

• travel (specifically Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire)
• folklore

The travel features are a no-brainer as these three counties are on our doorstep and I do enjoy finding out the history of a place.

I do enjoy learning about folklore but I don’t know how to incorporate it into my short stories. There are two tales in particular coming up in May that I really don’t think will suit the short story markets.

I gave up freelance feature writing a long time ago because there was too much work involved (ideas, research, pitching, interviewing, etc). So now if I get a burning idea to write about, I think I’ll keep it to the online platforms.

As it’s unlikely I’ll ever write a book on either topic (the travel features will be out of date by the time I get around to it in any case), it won’t matter if these stories are online. Although by the time I do get around to collating suitable material, I may not even be targeting Amazon in any case, especially after the news this week that Draft2Digital has acquired Smashwords.

So, I copied an earlier story from Medium to Vocal and sent it to a community there, I made us both tea and biscuits… (well, the biscuits were already made, I just put them on a plate), and I was about to start work when…

… a reminder email came in from the NHS to book my COVID booster. So I booked us both in for this Saturday at 11:15am.

Then I started my ghostwriting. I was going to get the bulk of it done on Thursday and finish it Friday morning before we had to go to a funeral. However, when I found out that we were leaving the house a lot earlier Friday morning, I decided to finish the main story at least. I finished work at 4:30am.

Today
We have a funeral to go to today, so the day has been cut in half. When we get back, I have the bonus short story to write for GW1 Book 8.

Have a great weekend.

Note: I’m not including links because they take forever to edit out when I’m preparing the final version of the book for publication.