I’m losing all track of time this week… this month, if truth be known. It must be all of these extra bank holidays that we’re getting.
My little road trip on Tuesday wasn’t as productive as I hoped, but I did get a lot of reading done while we waited in the car. When we were almost at our destination, just north of the River Humber, we stopped off at a petrol station to buy a picnic.
Once there, the poet changed into high-vis work-wear, steel-toe-cap boots, safety specs and hard hat, and I took the dog for a very short walk around the car park. Then I settled down with my Kindle to carry on reading a book I’ve been on with for NetGalley for far too long. It’s taken me a long time to get into this one, but I loved the premise so much I wanted to finish it. And on Tuesday evening I made a great dent in my progress. I also downloaded the latest book I’d recently been approved for. There must have been a 3G connection somewhere, because the Paperwhite downloaded it all by itself. (Just one of the many reasons I prefer the Paperwhite over anything else.)
I hauled out some work and, following a brainwave, made a note in my touchy-feely notebook for a good and proper ending to my short story Autumn Fayre. I made another note to check that The Kite Festival is in the current 10-project 2-ring binder. (It is.) Then I tried to remember the titles of the remaining stories that were also in the folder and could only come up with three all together, including Autumn Fayre and The Kite Festival. Duh!
Once he had finished with the day shift workers he wanted to talk to, the poet came back to the car so that we could eat our picnic together. He had to go back at 7pm to speak to the night shift workers and I finished another chapter of my book before starting work on The Fool, which I’d taken with me.
I read through some of what I’d already written so that I could work out how to lead into the next scene. Decision made, I wrote down the day’s date (I always do that when writing in my notebooks so I know how long something has taken me from inception), the scene number and the scene title, and underlined it all… just as the poet returned to the car.
9 May 2023
Scene 7 The Fitzhenry Quarry (dis.)
And that was it. That was all I managed. Still, broke the back of it, I suppose… And yes, the date and the scene name are double-underscored and the scene number is single-underscored.)
Once he’d removed his work-wear, etc, we drove for forty minutes to the coast and we went for a quick walk along the sea front. The tide was in, which is unusual for Cleethorpes, but down below where we park during peak time, when the dog isn’t allowed on the main beach, there’s a bit of beach that doesn’t get much sea and the foot/cycle path runs alongside it.
So, on to Wednesday… and another late start for me. The dog woke me up at stupid o’clock but went straight back to sleep, then he woke me up again at about 5am to go out. Then the poet was up early to go on another long-distance drive, but at least he was coming back the same day.
Over breakfast I caught up on social media and emails and I shared a few news stories that caught my eye.
Once I was in my office, the dog let me know that he didn’t want the basket that was already in there, he wanted the one he sleeps in at night. The one he sleeps in at night is a memory foam basket; the one in the office is just a regular fur-lined high-walled soft basket. At first he went and got in the office basket, and then he went and got in the night-time basket and gave me one of those looks. I swapped them out and he went straight in the night-time basket (now in the office) and straight to sleep!
I started the day by looking to see why a Substack post hadn’t auto-posted but when I got there it was because I’d scheduled it for 7pm instead of 9am, so that one was on me. I removed the schedule and posted it straight away, then shared it to social media. I created the next one to schedule, to post next Monday, and I updated the Trello board. The next Substack post will be up to date with all of the others, starting with the writing prompts for October. I just have to start the date work for those…
While I was on Trello, I updated the NetGalley board as well, adding on three or four books I’d recently been approved for. Then I went to Vocal to share another post on Ko-fi, this time a short story, and I shared that to social media too.
Twitter hasn’t been liking the pictures on the posts, so for the first time I used one of the ‘assets’ that Substack sent me to promote the story that was published yesterday. And then I went into LinkedIn and shared a couple of posts there, both from Substack.
By the time I’d done all of that I felt as though I’d done a full day’s work! I made myself a sandwich and settled down to read a couple of blogs and ended up falling down a rabbit hole for a bit.
After dinner I turned to the probate. It’s all done via online portal, which is a bit too much of a faff for me. They want a proper paper bank statement sent to my current address in the last 3 months. Who has proper paper bank statements these days? I can’t even remember the last time I saw one. And I can’t send them my photo ID through the post, I have to pay a solicitor or the post office to certify copies for me and send those… and that’s AFTER I’ve even found a solicitor or a post office.
Not a happy bunny there. They want everything done via their digital portal, including digital signatures, and then they want a paper bank statement?
I printed off the additional chapters I asked an author for, for the book I’ve been editing. Once I’ve copy edited those, I’ll tack them onto the end of the original and then do the electronic edit.
Finally, I made the changes to Autumn Fayre and sent it off.
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