I’m so stupidly pleased with myself that I got Words Worth Reading Issue Two out before the end of January. It’s had a couple of false starts over the past year or so and it kept getting pushed further and further into January. This time last week, it wasn’t coming out until Friday. So the fact it’s out today is a bonus.
Find it at books2read.com/DianeWordsworth. It’s at the top of the page at the moment, but even when it slips down to the categories, the bookazine series is the first category. Click on the image at the top of this post or in the sidebar (at the bottom on handheld devices) for a direct link.
I’m not completely satisfied with the cover this time. When I moved over to the Mac I lost the fonts I was using and had to use alternatives that came with the Mac. I might have a tinker with the cover for future issues.
This quarter the bookazine contains three brand-new and exclusive short stories, a brand-new and exclusive complete novelette, the third instalment of Night Crawler, and Pancake Race from the archives. When I get around to being organised, a pdf will become available to subscribers of the newsletter.
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The short stories and the novella will be republished as standalones in the coming months before going into themed and/or serial collections in the future. Including the novels, novellas and novelettes.
In future, I won’t finish the last bookazine until I know what’s going in the next bookazine, so I can include it on a ‘coming next time’ page. And for me to know something is definitely going in the next bookazine, it needs to be at least written.
The next bookazine will be out in April. Everything, apart from one short story, is written. The novella needs revising. The covers are all done, including the bookazine cover. I just have to finish those last two writing/editing jobs and then stitch it all together.
Once a story has been published in the bookazine in future, including the novel serialisations, the complete novellas and the novelettes, every single one will be published a few weeks later as a standalone and again in the future in a series or themed collection. I’m also going to use that time to update the covers and the interiors for the archive stories that have already been published, so Pancake Race will be first.
I’m not republishing it, I’m just updating it. And possibly the price. I need to steadily go through all of the books I published in my publishing challenge, and this is one way of getting started on that.
However, the jury’s out on whether or not I’ll republish or update Night Crawler. I’ll definitely update and re-price it at least, although the cover is fine.
Something else I was delighted about on Friday was the return of our scruffy magpie, the one with the damaged wing. I’d not seen him since before the snow came, or any of the magpies actually. He was getting blown and battered about a bit by the wind, but he was hopping up through the fruit trees and in among the snowdrops before coming up onto the patio where we put the bird food.
He distracted me a bit from my work, but the first job I did on Friday morning was share Friday’s blog post. I put some washing through and folded some washing up, then started today’s blog post. There was still plenty of food in the garden from the day before, so I didn’t need to go out and top that up, or scare Scruffy away.
I checked the links for the Copilot fiasco I shared on Friday, and they all seem to be working again. Hopefully, Microsoft has got the message by now, although it may already be too late for the paid users they have already haemorrhaged. Like others, another job I’m gradually doing is converting all of my Word-specific files to something more global so I can use them in whichever word-processor I choose. I will not be held to ransom or denied access to my own property.
I did some brainstorming for a short story that could cover up to 3 submission calls in the coming weeks. I won’t send the exact same story to all of them, but one of them will be my 12 Stories submission for January, and I can re-use that for either of the other 2. The rest of the day was spent fuming about AI in its various forms, researching alternative platforms, and lots of bitty things that really could have waited but were better than doing nothing all day.
And that was that. The end of the week that was.
Well done!
The update on Friday gave me the option to turn off Copilot, so I did, but Word still defaults to “insert” rather than “home” which is deadlable, but annoying. Thank you for your help.
It’s too annoying. I have to step away from it because I get so frustrated and it takes me away from my work. I’m very happy that I’ve already started to use LibreOffice. Nothing I can do about the client work, though.