Diary of a Tiger: w/c Fri 22 April

Chapter 16: Week commencing Friday 22 April

Friday
Another 3 books came in overnight from NetGalley, so I added those to the project. As of this morning, that’s 218…

I finished re-reading Two For The Dough by Janet Evanovich (for pleasure), started the next one, The Stories of my Life by James Patterson (for NetGalley), and updated the reading log spreadsheet and project tasks. I was delighted to be able to grab this one as it’s a book I wanted to buy anyway.

For some reason, last Friday’s Diary of a Tiger post didn’t auto-post. I think it’s failed before, so I’ll be keeping an eye on that.

I updated the publishing schedule to the end of May and created a cover for one of the short stories. And I had 2 more NetGalley books sent over… (220…)

I edited a few pages for the Yorkshire client, then finished work to go and do the weekly shopping.

The Weekend
On Saturday we travelled down to Solihull to see my mom. It was her birthday on Monday and we wanted to see her before then. After our visit, we went to look at Barston Lakes, as the poet’s an angler and quite a lot of his fishing buddies fish there. We got a bit confused over the parking, but took the dog for a quick trot.

When he realised the Packington Soames Fishery was also just across the road from Barston Lakes, pretty much, we went to have a look at that one too. But they didn’t allow any visitors in at all, whereas the other one has a public footpath. So we sat in the golf club car park overlooking one of the lakes and had our picnic.

Sunday was part day in the garden, part chill time. The poet was off to Stoke the following day, for another overnight visit, and he had to get his stuff together.

Monday
On Monday, another Wordsworth Short was published.

Around the Maypole is a story I wrote but didn’t do anything with, although it does appear in two of my own anthologies, Twee Tales Too and Twee Tales More.

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 spent much of the morning updating my new project management system. I’m gradually copying project information across and then deleting it from Asana. I also wrote Monday’s blog post.

NetGalley awarded me another book over the weekend (221…). I’m not sure when, as I didn’t receive an email notification. I just happened to be on my NetGalley bookshelf and I noticed there was a new book there. I started reading the James Patterson over the weekend, and continued with that.

I wrote Monday’s post and I started this post. One of my own jobs was to brainstorm a new short story. I’d already done that, so there was an easy tick off the list.

I realised I didn’t have my usual amount of time to finish Part 4 of Book 9 for GW1 client, so I negotiated a few more days, which took me into May. As I’ve not really done much for the writing challenge, I moved that to May too, as well as Project Management for Writers Gate 2 and 2 short stories.

I reneged on 2 short articles, as I won’t have time now to give either of them enough thought, but I do still want to write something for the first call for submissions on my list. I also moved The Fool along as well. This brought several projects to completion in May as well as those projects I moved complete to May.

All of this reduced my target word-count for April to 47,747, which was quite a big drop, but a much easier target when we took holiday time immediately after I was poorly.

A new contract landed from GW2 client, and negotiations have started for Book 10 for GW1 client. (Book 10! <swoon!> 😮 And to think, this work came at a time when I thought I’d never finish writing another novel ever again.)

For the rest of the day I did editing work, and on Monday evening I finished the first book of the new regime for NetGalley.

Tuesday
First job of the day on Tuesday was to outline the short story I’d already brainstormed. It turned out I’d already outlined it as well, on Plottr. I transferred the outline to my exercise book of outlines (by hand), and ticked the job off.

Next up I updated my reading log and started the next book to read, which is a re-read for pleasure. I don’t want to be having to review every single book I read, as it will quickly stop being an enjoyment thing if I do. I’ve started to re-read B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton. I allocated a spot to write the review for the book I just finished, which will be the week after next now, so I get a leg up.

Negotiations continued for GW1 Book 10, and I think we’ve come up with some dates that work, even though we have another long weekend right in the middle of it. I’ve given myself advance time, so if things happen again, then I’m not up against the wire.

After dinner, I did some more editing, and then some more diary manipulation, as we have a few bank holidays coming up.

Wednesday
On Wednesday morning we were up bright and early… well, we would have been if the poet’s alarm had worked. As it was, we were late getting up and had to dash out of the house. We then travelled in tandem to drop his car off for some routine maintenance. When we got back we had breakfast and both departed to our respective offices.

I started the day by updating the project schedule as we finally have a date for the poet’s operation. He goes in on 30 May, which is right up against the wire as far as his pre-op assessment is concerned and, in fact, the latest he can go in before having to have another. Fortunately, as he’s triple jabbed against Covid, we don’t have another trip to get his swabs done.

My work started by writing Thursday’s gardening post. This always begins by grabbing the pictures from my phone and putting them onto my memory stick, via the laptop. Then I have to think of something to write. While I was on the blog, I updated the sidebar with my ‘currently (re-)reading’ and my ‘out now’ graphics.

Next job was to prepare the next two books for publication. As I brought up the template for Wordsworth Shorts, however, I noticed a mistake in the last book that was published, Around the Maypole. One of the title pages still had A Stranger At Eight at the top. D’uh! Schoolgirl error. I fixed that, then I published the next one in the series, Wedding of the Year.

While the Wordsworth Shorts are indeed very quick to publish, I do need to watch out for silly mistakes like that.

I prepared the file for the second book, which took a lot longer as it consisted of 5 stories rather than one, even if they are all very short stories. Flash Fiction 2: another five very short stories will be available on 9 May.

My sister rang, and we had a long chat. We were on the phone so long that the poet made us both a sandwich (me and him, not me and her!) and brought mine to my desk. I downloaded the epub, mobi and Word files for the 2 new books, then I had to send the last 7 books to my Kindle.

I was just about to start client work when the call came in from the garage. The poet’s car was ready, or it would be in about an hour, which meant we had to set off within about 15 minutes. In all, this took the best part of 3 hours out of my day and had I not already itemised what I’d done so far, I would have thought the day was a washout.

Once we did get home, there wasn’t really time to start anything, and the week was fast running away from me. So I made an executive decision to postpone writing 2 new short stories for one of the weekly markets, starting again with the September submission.

I do already have the outline written for one of the stories, but it’s set in July, and I just don’t have the time to squeeze it in at the moment. I will still write this story, though. It will simply be another original Wordsworth Short, and it will still hopefully appear in July.

Having made that decision, I rejigged the week so that I have more chance of completing the contracted work, as well as another short story which is for a specific call for submissions. Then I closed the office for the day.

Thursday
Wordpress seems to be struggling again, this time with scheduled posts, and it’s missing the schedule. I’ve had a look at the forums and the only suggestion so far seems to be to try one of the many plugins available. Well, I think this is wrong.

If WP know there’s a problem, and if it was working 2 weeks ago, then surely they should be looking at fixing it rather than pointing everyone towards a plugin. I’ve added my own comments to the mix and, in the meantime, will just have to keep an eye on it.

The call for submission I was aiming at moved its final submission date from 6 May to 1 May. I didn’t have time to brainstorm, outline and write a short story of 3,500 – 6,000 words, so the story I was thinking of will be used instead to target one of the weekly women’s magazines. I changed the current project to a future project, and immediately gave myself several new hours in the coming days.

I spent some time opening a small cluster of bank accounts on a new banking app my sister told me about. This also consisted of moving the grand sum of £1 around to make sure everything was working. It seems to be and now my money is earning a far better rate of interest than it was. Mind you, as one of the accounts earned zilch and the others were all under 0.1%, it wasn’t difficult to make an improvement.

Ever the pessimist, although I do prefer the term ‘cautious’, I’ve left enough in my old current account to cover anything that might come out between now and when my new debit card arrives. I hate not being able to access my money, so I’ll make sure everything is working properly before taking that final plunge.

The rest of the day was spent editing.

Today
Today has been blocked out almost entirely for ghostwriting. I finish early, so we can do the shopping. Then it’s a 3-day weekend and also our wedding anniversary on Sunday.

Have a fantastic 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.