Chapter 8
Publication Day!
Today sees the publication of another Wordsworth Short.
Pancake Race is a short story I wrote a LONG time ago. I have two main characters, Paula and Sophie, and when I moved house about a year after I wrote it, two of the new neighbours were Paula and her daughter Sophie. So when the story was published, my new neighbour thought it was about her. (Clue: It wasn’t.)
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.
Gallery
Last week I started to create a gallery of all of the book covers included in this publishing challenge. I’m going to add to this now as I go along to save time at the end when I (hopefully) have at least 52 books finished. It should be more than that, though, because I started the challenge on 1 October 2021 and I hope to finish it on the last Monday in December, 2022.
Fifty-two is a difficult number to divide into equal rows. I could choose 13 rows of 4, or 4 rows of 13. However, the covers for the first will be too big, and the covers for the latter will be too small. Five is a nice round number, particularly as there are ten extra books from the latter part of 2021.
That will give me 62 books…And 62 books is even harder to divide equally. At the moment, the gallery is in rows of six. I might stick at six and just add an extra four books to the challenge to give me 11 complete rows. Or, if I’m two short, then there’s my 12 rows of 5. And I can afford to be two short as there are ten extra books from 2021.
Brand-new stories
Since I started this challenge, back in October 2021, I’ve written four brand-new short stories. Last week I wrote another one. There were two other brand-new stories I wanted to write, but one was out of time and the other one turned into something bigger.
I want to carry on writing new material as I work through the challenge so that I don’t come to publish one day and find that I don’t have anything left to publish. The new material will (and does) (and will hopefully) include:
- individual, standalone short stories
- series episodes that standalone but are part of a greater collection
- at least one novella
- at least one novel
- more than one writers’ guide
As I plan this new material and schedule it in, I’m also making various decisions. I already have two writers’ guides that are complete but need practical exercises adding or a good proof-read. These are both ‘Diary of…’ books, though, and I don’t want to publish a load of books that are similar unless they’re part of the project management series.
I also have one novella already started (The Fool) and two novels (The Beast Within and Catch the Rainbow). However, I’m itching to start something fresh so that I can do a Diary of… for both. I also need a writealong for the project management series, and I think I ought to start something fresh for that.
So, a lot of the work is still on the hoof, so to speak.
Jury service
This is a short chapter because I’m clearing the deck ahead of my jury service. While I’m on jury service the publishing challenge will continue. That’s what I’m busy doing this week: scheduling publication for the next three weeks. The third story is the story I wrote last week.
Over to you…
Do you have any questions? How is your publishing challenge going?
