Thursday 21 September 2023: A bluff old cynic? Moi?

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We’re both full of cold at the moment and the dog woke us up several times during the night. I still managed to get up on time, though, which was a small miracle, and only half an hour after the poet left for work.

I have to say, the dog doesn’t wake us throughout the night because he’s ill or in pain or suffering or anything like that. He’s always been an attention-seeker but these days his bladder isn’t as robust as it used to be. So he’s either nagging to come onto the bed (nope, he has to stay in his basket), or he’s letting us know he needs to go out. NOW. He’s still as happy and content as he’s always been and he still prefers to walk or run if he can rather than ‘go on his bike’, but he does love that too.

The previous evening, having printed off the magazine, I saw instantly where I could save pages and, therefore, cost: the font is a bit big… Of course, once I make it smaller, I have to do all of the formatting again, which will take time again. BUT… it will be done, and next time all I should have to do is just drop in the new material… Yeah, well, we’ll see. (Call me a bluff old cynic.)

The magazine had to be put to one side, though, as I neglected all of my other work over the previous week and a half. I called it ‘cooling’ and stepped away from the Affinity.

Over breakfast, I caught up on social media and emails, and I read a couple of chapters of the latest book I’m reading for review. This is one I was unable to convert to unprotected ebook format, so it’s not on my Google Play Books.

I’ve narrowed down publishers whose books I want to review to just one or two, and this, fortunately, is one of them. But because I didn’t have it saved anywhere other than on my Kindle, I thought I’d start this one next. I’m having the usual issue with similar sounding names (Aaron & Aiken, Steve & Steele, Jim & Tom, etc, sometimes in the same sentence), but the story has gripped me and that’s always a good thing.

However… it feels like it’s a series book and I feel as though I’ve missed something. So I checked and yes, it’s Book 3. Not to worry. I might have one or more of the others in one of the two bundles I have from Joffe already. But I’ll see how I get along first.

Anyway, I had to push that to one side as well because, well, I have work to do.

It looks as though I’ll be following the exodus from Twitter. I’ve been hanging on and joining in and interacting and things. But the news on the street is that charges are afoot, for even the most basic of usage. So I too will be waving buh-bye at some point. For now I’m removing Tweets and awaiting another archive download.

My good friend Devon sent me an email code to join Bluesky, and I was delighted to see a number of faces I recognised. So I spent part of the morning following and being followed back by quite a few… ‘skeeters’, are they called? ‘Skeeps’? I don’t yet have any invite codes of my own to send, but I already promised another writer friend that he’d get first refusal when I do get one. If you’re on there, I’m @dianewordsworth.

I updated my reading log, started today’s blog post, made a cup of tea, and settled down to the editing job I still have. At 2pm I downed tools and started to get ready to go out. My haircut was at 2:30pm and last time I got there bang on time, he’d already started on someone else and I had to wait. If that happened this time, I wasn’t going to book in with him again.

It didn’t happen again, and this time he listened to me when I said what I wanted. So I booked another appointment for the end of November.

When I got back, the poet was home, but I still had work to do. I had a quick whizz around social media, deleted a few more Tweets, commented and replied to blog posts and comments, then off I pootled to do some more on the editing job, which took the rest of the afternoon.

A third book landed for review from new fave publisher, so I collected and converted that and uploaded all three new books to Google Play Books. Did another page of updates on there too.

Before finishing for the night, I did another quick brainstorm for The Mucky Duck. Then I closed everything down and called it a day.


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