If the dog woke up in the middle of the night on Wednesday, I slept right through it. The poet’s alarm woke me up and even then I went straight back to sleep for half an hour, and it was the dog moaning then that woke me up. Right after someone tried to force me to eat maggots in a dream…
Once I’d got the social media and email catchup out of the way, I finished reading the NetGalley book I’ve apparently been reading since March. I went to update my reading log and was surprised to see that it wasn’t at the bottom of the list and that I’ve read two more books since I started this one, neither of which were for NetGalley. At least that means I don’t have to write and share reviews for those two.
I hit my desk late morning and dealt with some probate work first. Then I created the illustrations for the NetGalley book review, wrote the review, shared it everywhere I can (I can’t review it on Amazon until July), and updated my Trello card, moving it along to the ‘post on Amazon when published’ column. I selected the next book to read, which is a book about writing short stories, and having been approved for Book 4 in a series in the past few days, I went and pulled up the Trello card for Book 3 so it’s on my radar.
In the midst of all of that I had my dinner, fed the birds, emptied the kitchen bins, and walked around the garden with the dog for a bit.
I shared yesterday’s Substack post on Facebook and LinkedIn, but the assets were late coming through for some reason so Twitter had to wait. I created the illustrations for today’s blog post and for Instagram. And I added the new book to the reading log.
I didn’t get an auto-reply acknowledging my short story submission on Wednesday and I was sure I had one the time before. I asked in a FB group and they all said that they’d never received an auto-acknowledgment before. So I checked my emails and there it was, the auto-acknowledgement for a story I submitted in March. There was a slight difference between the two emails, so I sent it again. I forgot to add an apology for sending it twice. But the auto-reply still didn’t come and I started to get paranoid.
Off I pootled to ask the World Wide Web and it seems that Yahoo has been having problems these past few days. I logged my own issue and left, feeling a lot less insecure. Then I realised I hadn’t received any media assets for yesterday’s Substack post either. So I fired of a query to them too. If it’s Yahoo where the problem lies, then I may have to resort to using my website email provider in future.
For the rest of the day I redesigned the blog. It’s been a while coming and there are a few things I haven’t worked out yet, like how to change ‘related posts’ to ‘previous’ or ‘next’. But I ran out of time and had to walk away from it.
The poet has a gig this evening, but I don’t think we have anything else planned for this SHORT, regular weekend. Whatever you’re doing, I hope it’s a good one!
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The amount of time we have to dally with tech because it doesn’t do what we need the first time is frustrating.
My first reaction is always ‘it must be me’, so when I find out others have had similar problems, I feel much better. Workarounds and investigations do eat into other work time, though, and that’s really frustrating. Tech should work. Especially in this day and age.