I’m not complaining. There was a time that I was working all hours when I went self-employed and I started to resent it when there were bank holidays and I was still working. One day I made an executive decision to take the bank holidays too, and it’s continued to work and make me happy ever since. So I’ll be enjoying today’s holiday as well, and the weekend catchup will be tomorrow.
The dog let me sleep all night on Thursday night, which was nice, and I was up at a reasonable time. The poet had video meeting after video meeting for much of the morning, though, so I stayed in the living room catching up on social media and emails.
I made a decision over the Substack versus SendInBlue dilemma just as notification came in that SendInBlue had changed and was now Brevo. The change didn’t affect my decision, but it did confirm that I’d made the right one. I’m going to keep the newsy newsletter and short story with them and I’m going to develop the Substack one into a paid-for platform with free-to-read articles that will be archived after about four weeks. Paid subscribers will still be able to access the archive.
I looked at the content I already populated it with and I considered the plans I’m putting into place for the premium content, and it’s going to be a writing-based publication for writers. Here again is the link directly to the publication.
Once I could get to my desk without fear of interrupting anyone, the first job I did on Friday was the weekly tech scan and backup. I went and scheduled the next article on Substack. But instead of trying to work out which one was next, I went straight to Trello and found the easy answer there. And then I wrote a special newsletter to the existing subscribers explaining the changes and to give them an option to unsubscribe.
I scrapped the short story The Long, Unending Day as I didn’t feel I had enough time to make it good enough to submit before yesterday. The deadline was Sunday but I’m going to have a go at next month’s instead. The Long, Unending Day will go into the graveyard of abandoned projects (™Devon Ellington) to be worked on in more depth one day.
The poet made us both dinner and then we had to go out to the hospital for me to have a bone density scan. I’ve been pushed forward for this (a) because of the medication I take for the hiatus hernia, (b) because of that x-ray no one told me about in 2016 showing wear and tear and a slipped vertebra, and (c) because my mom broke her hip. The radiologist showed me the results and while she did see some wear and tear, and she identified the slipped vertebra, as far as bone density is concerned I’m still well within normal.
On the way home we went for the shopping. Came home, put it away, and returned to the office, from where we watched a bit of a thunderstorm through the window. We watched the birds too. The chicks have started to arrive with their parents, which is great, but that means no more whole peanuts for a while or anything else a small bird might choke on.
I should have spent some time on another short story but I was starving hungry and it was gone 6pm. So we called it a day and closed the office. The dog was much better on Friday compared to Thursday.
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Glad everything went well with the bone scan, Rufus is better, and the Graveyard of Abandoned Projects is useful!
I love Substack. I need to build in more time in my schedule to hang out during the various writer “office hours” — good conversations and leads come out of there.
My Substack was really messy for ages because I didn’t know what to use it for. Fingers crossed I have something workable now.