Thursday 23 Mar 2023: A glorious day

I woke up to a glorious day yesterday. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, next door had washing blowing on the line, and Rufus wanted to just sit on the lawn or roll on his ‘fetch’. When I made breakfast, I took it, my cup of tea, my phone and my tablet into the conservatory, which was boiling hot. I opened the windows and sat down, and remembered that it’s a digital-free zone. That meant I was able to just enjoy my breakfast and drink my tea while it was still hot.

But yes, spring has sprung. Or at least for now it has. Windows were flung open in both the office and the bedroom to let in some fresh air. The night before, just after dusk, when Rufus and Holly both went for a walk around the garden, there was a pair of blackbirds hopping around the lawn as well. They weren’t bothered at all by the cat and the dog and they didn’t seem to be looking for worms, but I suppose they may have been doing just that.

First job, then, was to finalise yesterday’s blog post. I’d left it a bit undone due to the tech issues with Novelist and with the date work taking longer than it should. The second job was to start today’s blog post. And then the next job was date work. I might not have done the social media stuff on the phone over breakfast (due to being in that digital-free zone), but I had already done it in bed because the poet woke me up early to let me know what time he expected to be home.

As the morning drew on I had another call from the poet with an updated ETA, and the sky started to cloud over. We had rain forecast from around teatime, and that seems to be the case for most of this week. I had a quick look at Novelist on the laptop again and thought it had gone haywire again. But it seems there are slight differences between the content holders on the web-based version compared to those on the app version. I had a quick tweak and saved it to the cloud and then went back to the date work for a bit.

We had a payout from ALCS this week. Mine’s been going down gradually but then I remembered all of these books I’ve published and I wondered if I could add those. I went along, started to add in the ISBN and voila! They’ve been accepted. So that will now be a new check item on the Trello boards.

I alternated between proofreading, date work and short story writing, allocating each one a pomodoro. I tried again with Novelist on the laptop and it worked for the most part, but every so often there it was again, not working properly and not typing when I was. I tried reducing the screen so it replicated a mobile device and that sometimes work and it sometimes didn’t. So while I do try composing on the laptop, I’ll just have to keep saving versions of any stories I write on there so I don’t lose them.

I nipped in to buy the books again that didn’t arrive and were cancelled, and they’re working out more than a pound each dearer than the ones that were apparently lost in transit… Yeah, right. So off went an email to them.

The poet came home from his three-day work trip, did some work and then had a soak in the bath. I didn’t finish the date work, but I did finish the short story. It was about 250 words too long but after I read it out loud to the poet (in the bath he was a bit of a captive audience…) (he was in the bath, I wasn’t) I managed to cut it down to just 2 words short of the 2,500-word target. Then I submitted it to the 12 Stories in 12 Months challenge.

And that’s *another* short story completed. (Yay!)

There are no writing prompts today after all. Hopefully they’ll be here tomorrow.

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