I was up relatively early again on Tuesday and, again, I got through a lot of stuff on the phone over breakfast because I knew pretty much what I would be doing for most of the rest of the day. When I got to my desk, however, I remembered that I hadn’t done any writing prompts for two weeks. So the dates work was the first work of the day, going through my August calendar sheets and adding:
- fixed dates every year (in red)
- date-specific dates that ocuur every year (in blue)
- date-specific dates that are topical for this year (in green), and
- general reminders for things like ‘harvest festival’ or ‘summer weddings’ or ‘British holidays’ (in black).
As I added some, I highlighted in green any that I’d like to pursue myself and write either an article or a short story around, and I started an ideas spreadsheet to add them to.
I had an ideas spreadsheet back in the day when I was prolific at non-fiction and I was writing query letters slanted towards at least three different markets for up to six different topical ideas. That spreadsheet was like my bible and I filled it in religiously. I found an old one a week or so ago and I thought that some of the ideas I jotted down but didn’t do anything with, and even some that I did do something with and went on to sell, might make good and interesting topics for, say, Medium or Vocal publications/communities. I’d also like to find some other online markets that might also be interested in the kind of stuff I write.
What did I used to write? Mostly Very British Stuff. Customs, traditions, events, interviews, places of interest, and of course the topical historical stuff. I should be doing that again.
I had a bit of a minor brain murmur when I started to type today’s draft blog post over the previous day’s actual blog post. I’d spotted a couple of typos in Tuesday’s post and went in to change them, immediately going into Buffer then to delete the reposts. Buffer’s doing okay, but I do wish it wouldn’t automatically repost any posts I go in to correct after it’s been published. It might be a feature in there somewhere, and it might be a premium feature, but I can’t find it and so far it’s my only complaint really.
Anyway, brain murmur… I was actually editing Tuesday’s post instead of drafting today’s post, but fortunately I spotted it before saving anything. Even so, I still went on to check that I hadn’t changed the published post again.
Lifting the dates from websites is quite time consuming and after I’d done all of the historical days and folklore things, which take less time, I started an ‘on this day in history’ and only managed to do the first week of August before putting it to one side so I could do some work as well. I started by opening up the Novelist web page and carrying on with Killer Queen…
But something was wrong. Two things were wrong.
- It didn’t feel… ‘right’ composing into Novelist at the desk when I’m usually composing into Scrivener or, for the short stories, straight into Word, and
- I kept getting thrown out of Opera or the keyboard stopped typing inside the composer.
One help page suggested I refresh my browser to an older version, so I did that and it wiped the work I’d done… So I wasn’t happy about that. Fortunately it was only a few hundred words and, also fortunately, I’d not long saved a version to Word. So I deffed Novelist web version and carried on in Word. It still didn’t feel right, though, so I had a quick search to see if there was another way I could write stories on mobile devices and on the laptop, but Novelist was still the best of them all.
More time wasted there…
I went and sat in the living room with my tablet and tapped out the next few scenes on there. And then it was back to the date work. But the date work was dragging on a bit and I had other work to do. So I left it there and decided to add it to tomorrow’s blog post instead.
I did some proofreading, but I was tired and the good light was waning and I called it a night. Today I have more date work to do, obviously, hopefully the writing prompts (it’s the take-one-idea part that takes the longest once I have the dates), and that short story to finish for 12 Stories in 12 Weeks.
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I’m so sick of wasting time on tech misadventures.
I’m considering invevsting in a new tablet. My old one is limping, the screen is cracked, and it’s not recognizing the usb converter anymore, so I think it’s just about had it.
They have such a short life span, don’t they? Or it seems as though they do. I’ve had another try, in case it was just a glitch. But it’s still doing it. I might try a different browser. I’m having all sorts of issues with Opera since the last update.
I used to love Opera, but then it got too glitchy. And since they now build the hardware and the software to fail so we have to keep pouring money in, I’m getting fed up.
It takes up a lot of memory and carries on working in the background. Ian’s forever telling me to get rid of it because he hates it, but I really don’t like the alternatives.
We can’t live without technology, whatever we think. But it does drive us up the wall!
I’m gradually spending more time off it now. It’s the people on social media I’m more interested in and more worried about not keeping up with. I think that’s where it’s got me.