The last job I did on Thursday was finalise the three editing samples with tracked changes I did for an editing job I liked the look of. These weren’t paid or even free sample edits, they were examples of previous editing work. I’d forgotten how slow Word is these days with tracked files. It took me a few goes to work out that I could either send earlier versions, topped and tailed to the correct length, or I could save later versions as older Word files. I did a mix of both and sent them all off with my carefully crafted pitch. That’s three pitches I sent off last week in the end.
The dog sleeping through the night was a one-off, it seems. Or it was last week at least. He had me up three times during the night on Thursday/Friday and that meant I struggled to get up on Friday morning. I did, though. And I think it was a fairly productive day.
First of all I arranged for a vet visit for Holly. She’s fine, but since her adventure last week she’s not let us touch one of her ears. We did pull out quite a few ticks, once we could see them (don’t worry, we pulled everything out – they were still wriggling), but there were a couple in and around her ear. And now she won’t let me have a closer look. So she’s off to the vet for an expert to look her over, and we’re having her micro-chipped as well. (Yes, she’s at least 17, but it’s never too late to chip them.)
I did all of my faff work on the mobile phone because the poet had another video meeting, and I hung up the last of the previous day’s washing.
Once I made it to my desk, the first thing I did was select, copy and paste another short story to Medium. This time it was the flash fiction Pippa & Davey Forever. First of all I cropped some of the cover image to illustrate it. Then I reformatted the story, proof-read it, submitted it to a new publication on Medium, and updated my submissions sheet and the Trello card.
While I was in Medium, I updated the submissions sheet with money earned so far this month for the July prompts I posted there earlier in the week. I’m keeping tabs on both platforms to see which one works out better for me in the long run. This includes lead times between submission and acceptance or rejection and publication as well as how much each one earns where.
I copied and pasted the same story in Vocal, added the image, and went through the whole procedure again. And, again, by the time I’d updated my spreadsheet and my T-card, it had been auto-published. I shared the link to social media and ticked both Medium and Vocal off in my diary.
They’re daily tasks now. If I don’t write something new for them, if there isn’t an interesting blog post to add, they get something from stock. I have some old articles where I retained copyright that I want to top, tail and update, and those will be going off into the ether too. And I also have some non-fiction story ideas that I don’t think any of the paying markets will run that they can have too.
I started today’s blog post and then quickly whizzed through the daily competitions – considerably earlier than I did on Thursday. Then I looked at the job board again and moved that to a daily task. For now. There was nothing there I fancied, so I made something to eat and moved into the afternoon.
After dinner, I did my weekly scan and backup, I did this week’s diary, and I changed a hospital appointment. Then I received notification of a new subscriber on Vocal and I was delighted to see that it was a very successful author whose work I admire. I had a chat with one of my existing editing clients to ask which job to start next as I hadn’t heard from the author I’ve been working on recently. She said she hadn’t heard either and would try to make contact and in the meantime would I start the next job. So I printed that off.
Then it was time to take the cat to the vet. Just as I was wrapping up today’s blog post, the email arrived saying the short story I submitted to Medium on Friday was accepted and published. I quickly nipped over there to say thank you and to pin it to the top of my profile. And off we went.
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Busy day!
It’s so important to keep track of what does well where, so we can make necessary adjustments about where to point our time, isn’t it? I’m interested in reading the differences between different platforms.
Have a good week.
So far, one is ahead of the game in lead times, but the other is way out in front for reads.