Diary of a Tiger: Wed 27 Jul 2022

Image by Jan Barkmann from Pixabay
Chapter 27: Wednesday 27 July

So, it’s been almost an entire month since my last posting. There have been several contributing factors, most of which have been work. Another biggie is on the horizon too, but I don’t want to jinx it by posting about it too early, so in the meantime, I’m going to go back to daily postings with a very quick roundup.

Quick roundup
For a start, we’ve both had a really, really bad cough each. We think the poet picked it up on his last trip to the midlands as he went to visit my mom while he was working down there, and she had a nasty cough. Saying that, we also did a bit more people-ing than we usually do, but it’s likely the cough came from the midlands.

I’m about 2 days behind the poet, but it’s been nearly 3 weeks. His has gone, mine’s clearing at last, but we both did do extra work when we should have been resting.

The next thing that happened was major, major technological failure. I lost a good 3 days solid, plus all the extra time it took to gradually reinstall everything as I was using it. A lot of time was also spent detective-ing to find out what the problem actually was, and it seems it’s a clash between Office 365 and Windows 11 plus Office 365 trying to force automatic cloud storage on users.

And then, once I’d found out what was causing most of it, I passed that along – to friends as well as to clients who were waiting for work from me.

This had a very bad knock-on effect that caused me to fall way behind on both the ghostwriting and the editing jobs. There was also a massive bug in the editing job that I had to detect and destroy too, and that meant me going back to the beginning of the electronic edit no less than 3 times.

I’ve finally caught up on the ghostwriting, but I’m still a long way behind on the editing, and I have another 2 editing jobs in from that client as well.

I did manage to do some work on the CampNaNo stories, but I had to move the 2nd drafts to August and just concentrate on the 1st drafts. I also managed to send out a couple of CampNaNo newsletters and I started this week’s too, which includes a free short story, so if you haven’t signed up yet, you know what to do.

The other thing I managed to do was set up an archive for the newsletters in case any subscribers wanted to catch up on any they’d missed. The details for this will also be in this week’s newsletter.

I also had to very quickly publish Monday’s flash fiction short story so I don’t miss my publishing challenge. I did that on Sunday, so it’s still being populated in some of the online stores.

This week so far
On Monday the revisions came in for the last 2 parts of the ghostwriting gig. I did some admin work for Monkey Dust, who have a gig this weekend, and the gig list. And I did a lot of phone calling (on a real phone) and emailing about the news that will be revealed later. I worked on the editing for one pomodoro, then I did the revisions for Part 2 and sent them back.

Here’s the book that was published on Monday.

The Robin is a very short story I wrote a long time ago. It was inspired by one of the elderly gentlemen I once worked for as a home carer, which was a very, very long time ago. I sent it out a few times, but it was the wrong length, or not enough emotion, or a well-worn theme, or even simply ‘not suitable’. So it lay there until I decided to publish it myself.

Now it has been published in Twee Tales Twee, Twee Tales More, Flash Fiction, and Five Third Age Short Stories.

Tuesday
On Tuesday I started to catch up on the blog again, and I started to catch up on my NetGalley reading again. I’d already managed a blog post for Monday’s publication, and I opened up today’s post too. Then I remembered that I wanted to post a book review as well and that usually posts on a Tuesday. So I moved today’s ‘daily’ post to Wednesday.

Catching up on both reading and reviewing also means creating new graphics on Canva to illustrate the blog posts. I created the images, wrote Tuesday’s blog post, and copied it and them to NetGalley, Amazon and Medium. I started to read the next book on the list and was grabbed by the first page. I had to force myself to put it aside so I could carry on catching up with work.

While I was on Medium I read a few articles, including one from the founder, who was stepping down, and one from his replacement, who is stepping up.

The successor asked for feedback and there were almost 550 replies, most of which were saying ‘put it back to how it was before they started messing with it’, which was also one of mine back at the start of the year when a load of changes were suddenly thrust upon paying users without notice or consultation or anything. I added my two-penneth, then came back to work.

Eventually, I got around to catching up on some paid work too – Tuesday was all about catching up, it seems.

Today
Today will be more catching up, and it will continue until I, well, catch up… if ever I do. I have ghostwriting, editing and writing to do, today and for the rest of the week. And I have the next two books to publish as well.

I’ll try to post updates tomorrow and on Friday, and then it will be back to normal.


Diary of a Tiger: Out in 2023

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