Monday 14 August 2023: Flying off the shelves

First job Friday morning was a trek down to the doctor’s to collect a repeat prescription. It’s less than five minutes away, on foot, so I was there and back in ten. Once at my desk, I decided to catch up with some submissions work.

Harvey’s Festival is a short story I wrote for a prompt for 12 Stories in 12 Months. I already had the idea and the outline. It was waiting to go into the production machine. Then this prompt came up, ‘thin’, and I made Harvey a thin dog. It was a bit subtle, but it was there at the top. The story had to be 1,200 words, which I hit on the nail, again.

Not long after, a submission window opened for one of our weekly magazines here, and I revised the story to fit one of their 1,900-word slots. They didn’t choose it and it’s been idling in my hard drive ever since. So the next job I did was whittle that down to 1,800 words and send it off to the next market on my list.

The prompt was already up on 12 Stories in 12 Months for next month. The target word-count is 1,000 words and the deadline is 4 September. I wrote out a Post-it with the prompt on in felt pen and the details in biro, and added it to the power board.

An email came in from a publisher with a link to NetGalley, inviting me to read and review another of theirs on there. I went and claimed it, sent it to my Kindle, and updated my Trello board.

I went to see if the reading list was up yet for the romance ghost writing workshop in September. It wasn’t, so I moved that task to next week. Then I did something I’ve not done in a long time. I checked my sales reports on Draft2Digital.

What a surprise I had. I knew the books were selling because royalties keep arriving in my bank account. What I didn’t realise was that Project Management for Writers: Gate 2 was still flying off the shelves. This is book 2 in the series, yet it has out-sold book 1 already. And book 2 is supposed to follow on from book 1.

Well, I went to make another mockup, as the ones I did the week before didn’t include book 2 on its own, apart from one with a white background I’ve been using for ages. It took me seconds to rustle up, once I’d chosen the background. I really need to move on to doing something else in Affinity now!

I still should have been writing the first drafts of Fireworks at Killiecrankie and Project Management for Writers: Gate 3, but I moved them both to this week. Which means I have a lot to do this week before we break up for our holiday on Thursday.

On Saturday, we finally got into the garden. Today, I finally wrote about it. I’ve not done a garden post for two months, so you can read the latest update here. The poet also baked a dozen oat & carrot bread rolls and two dozen Shrewsbury biscuits. Then he had a go at blackberry ice cream…

The gardening and the baking continued into Sunday, with the poet baking two rye & wholemeal loaves while I made breakfast.

My secret sugarholic blog is attracting a LOT of attention, so as I hadn’t posted there for a while either, I finally caught up with that one too. Wormy’s Kitchen is going to form part of the secret sugarholic as we’re trying to reduce sugar in our diet. Read today’s update here.

I was up at the crack of dawn this morning, approximately half an hour after the poet had already left for his long drive south. It wasn’t the dog’s fault this time. My car was booked in for its first ever service (it’s only six years old…) and I had to take it in. The bloke who owns the garage ran me back home and he’ll pick me up again later when it’s ready. This means I’m carless for the day.

I have a lot of work to squeeze in this week, as we’re off on our hols soon. And it’s a four-day week too. I’d best get on.

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