Wednesday 16 April 2025: Focus

After a relatively active Sunday, I did think I’d be in agony Monday morning. But I wasn’t. Always good to start the day with a bonus. Even better to start a whole week with one.

I put a washload through and by the time I’d finished my dirty cuppa, I could hang it out. The sun was still shining on Monday and it was a lovely, blowy morning, even if it was a few degrees cooler than of late. I didn’t have to feed the birds, as the large capacity bird feeders are doing quite well. I extremely doubt they’ll last longer than a week, but at least the birds won’t starve if and when we go away for a few days.

Keeping my fingers crossed that the good weather would hold for another day, I put another washload through before hitting my desk. First job of the day was blog post planning for while we’re away. One of my Christmas gifts was a set of blog planning pdfs, so I selected the one I thought would be best, printed off several copies back-to-back, and settled down to work.

Even with my TickTick calendar in front of me and some dates already filled in with certain publication events and bank holidays, I still trashed one set of planning pages and had to start again. But when I had a complete set, I had to change a few dates. I could do those in biro, though, without printing pages off again. I’d forgotten that the days before we go away are normal days, so I didn’t need to build those into the advance schedule too.

Once I was satisfied with the schedule, I put the pages into a ring binder where I could see at a glance what needed to be done when. The planner also reminded me of publication day posts, for which I need covers and graphics. I already had the covers, but now I’ve started to make them in Affinity, I decided to transfer those over to Affinity too. I couldn’t quite get one of them to look exactly the same, but they do still look good, and even better with the wider range of colours I can use.

There’s a ‘coming soon’ panel in my sidebar on here (it’s at the bottom on handheld devices), so the next thing I did was switch out those cover images for the new ones. I wasn’t 100% happy with the artwork on a couple of the covers, so I sourced images I liked and re-made those covers. There’s still one outstanding, but I can’t find an image anywhere that would be more suitable. In the future, I probably have to look for or commission new pictures for an entire series. But for now, and for my own purposes, they’ll have to do.

I downloaded Krita to have a look at that, but it will take just as long for me to learn how to use it let alone learn how to draw and paint again. The poet has Adobe Illustrator, I think. He’s made graphics for me in the past, so I might ask him to see if he can squeeze me in, although that won’t be for these upcoming books either.

I started work on creating the graphics and writing the words for some of the advance posts. Then I set about publishing the next short story on the schedule. All went well, new cover and all, until I uploaded it to Google Books, where I noticed the old prices still on a lot of my older publications. It didn’t take me long to go through and update those, and while I did that I changed the covers for those I have new versions too. It was when I went into Draft2Digital to change the prices on those that it all went downhill…

Not because there was a problem with D2D, but because there are so many. Three pages-worth. Twenty-five books to a page…I also switched out the new covers on those there as well. And while I was in there I noticed that a lot of the older publications didn’t have the ‘sign up to hear about new releases’ page. So I went through again and added those. 

Then I noticed that the flash fiction stories in particular didn’t have teaser books. They used to point to the flash fiction collections, but I unpublished those a while back with a view to republishing them in larger volumes. So I went through them all again to make sure they all had teaser links…

And then… (sigh) I noticed that not all of the Wordsworth Shorts are consistent in their layout. Some have phrase capitals at the start and at every section change, while others didn’t have them at the start. I tried to tell myself that I was busy, that no one would care, and that no one, in fact, would likely even notice. But I knew, and that meant the OCD knew. So that meant I had to go through them all AGAIN to change that.

It took me hours. Hours and hours I didn’t really have to spare. So today, I must resist. I must get on with the schedule. I have a short story to write before next Wednesday and a novella to write before the end of the month. And we have a holiday.

Focus!