I’m always tired on Thursdays, I always have been. I’ve never known why, but it’s a regular phenomenon. So I can’t really blame getting up earlier than usual this week, although I’m sure that doesn’t help matters.
We were up again at 7:30am yesterday because (a) the builders were coming back at 8am to do more work on the conservatory, and (b) the poet was off on another business trip for two days (booo!). He left at probably just before 8am, but the builders didn’t get here until 8:30am. They were gone again by 11:15am because they’d gone as far as they could with the materials they had. The rest were in the van, which was on a ramp in a garage somewhere having its brakes fixed and some tyres replaced.
They’re coming back again today… again at 8am… 🙄
Because I was tired, I took some getting going, dragging my feet, faffing on the mobile phone (I’ve discovered that one of the pay-as-you-play apps now includes one of the two games I regularly pay…), skipping around social media, etc, etc.
Some post arrived, including a card that the post office claimed didn’t have a stamp on. But it did have a stamp on and it was the new kind. They said it had been used before, but I don’t think it was. The poet paid £2.50 to have it delivered, so I think we should look into it.
On Wednesday I received a customer survey asking about a delivery I’ve received and how I found the service. I told them the delivery hadn’t arrived, and you can probably guess how the rest of the survey went. I checked on Thursday to see when the books were dispatched, and they were sent on 1 March, from the UK. So I fired off an email to customer services, saying the books hadn’t arrived, and they responded almost instantly by cancelling the order and refunding the money…
Now I think I would have checked first that there wasn’t some kind of hold-up en route, or I might have said the order was cancelled and if I still wanted the books to click here and they’d raise the order again, or I might have said that the order had been re-placed and to let them know if the original order showed up rather than simply cancelling the order… which suggests to me that perhaps the books hadn’t been dispatched at all… (Bluff old cynic? Moi?)
Anyway, once the refund has hit my bank I’ll order them again. If it happens again, then I probably won’t ever use them again.
After whizzing through the competitions, I stared at my content calendar spreadsheet for a while and tried to work out how I could replicate all of the same information but in a less messy or more efficient way. I’d like to replicate it on Trello if I can, but I think that with the number of columns and sections I have and different anthology collections and things that I might actually need something more sophisticated, like a database or something. So off I went in search of some way to keep a more reliable track of all of my stories and publications.
I spent a lot of hours looking for databases or spreadsheets or project management systems to use as content calendars and trying a few out, but I couldn’t find any that I liked or that did what I wanted them to. So I went back to my spreadsheet and spent another lot of hours rearranging that, sorting it out, colour coding it, adding in items yet to be written and items started. I was finally happy with it, but the day was gone by then. No editing, no proofreading, no other writing. All admin and faff. So I had a quick look at the jobs board and earmarked one to consider today.
Today I need to pull my socks up, but it’s another early start for me…
Have a great St Patrick’s Day weekend!
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