Thursday 15 May 2025: The magic bakery returns

So, Wednesday…I was up on time, but I did sit in my armchair with my dirty cuppa reading a daily newspaper on Readly. Still time-consuming, it doesn’t take up as much time as doom-scrolling used to. I’m learning something as I read. And that’s really the main reason I started doom-scrolling in the first place, to see what was going in the news. May as well go straight to the horse’s mouth.

I topped up the birds’ drinking water and bird baths and hung out some washing I’d forgotten about the day before, after first washing it again so it didn’t smell mildewy. And I did my chair and floor exercises, which are currently taking less than 18 minutes from start to finish, although I do expect that to go up as some of the exercises get steadily longer.

Once at my desk, I did quite a lot of banking admin. My sister talked me into getting my first banking app a couple of years ago. She’s older than me, but I was the one who screwed my face up at the idea of having a banking app. I don’t trust anyone with my money, never have, and the only reason I used bank accounts in the very first place was so that people could pay me. But she convinced me to give it a try, and I think I adapted quite well, considering.

The only thing I didn’t like about this banking app was the fact it could only be used on one device at a time, which didn’t bode well if my phone ever got nicked and I couldn’t get online to secure the accounts. I mean, traditional banks managed to let us use simultaneous devices, why couldn’t this new-fangled app thing? 

BUT…the interest rate was the best I’d seen in a long time, and I mean since the days of monthly income accounts when independent banks and building societies still lined our streets in their gazillions. AND…we got cashback on everything we bought, apart from things like car servicing. 

THEN…the cashback started to come with strings attached, and it went down and down and down, until you could only earn something like £15 a month instead of it being unlimited. AND THEN…the interest rate started to come down and down and down, until even the High Street banks were bettering it. 

My banking app bragged about being competitive, but it wasn’t even close any more. So this week I’ve been researching alternatives, and yesterday I found a few I liked the look of. Two accounts were with a bank I’m already with; the other was with another banking app. I applied for all three, was accepted for all three, and started to transfer money from the old app to the new app, and from the old app into one of the new accounts. 

I don’t have that much money, to be honest. I never have. But I have more now than I had for more than 35 years previously. (I mean at a time.) And with me easing off the workload and slowly into retirement (the poet is also 2½ years away from retirement, max), I need as many new streams of income I can find. Making the most of fixed interest rates and fixed terms is just one new stream of income. And that’s what I spent the rest of yesterday morning doing.

I caught up with Week 5 of the writing with depth workshop and looked at the assignment. Assignment 5 is a good story-starter for me, so I’ll be filing it away for future use.

I watched the birds again. One of the dunnocks (hedge sparrows) had 2 chicks with her, both gaping their mouths at her, demanding that she feed them. They got slightly separated from their mum, and one of them had a go at one of the large capacity feeders, trying to peck at the food through the white plastic container. There was a wood pigeon on one side of it and a starling on the other. It kept asking them to feed it, but they ignored it. So it jumped on the wood pigeon’s back! Giving the poor bird the fright of its life! 

So funny, and such a treat. But not as funny as the day before when 6 starling chicks were all getting a bath in one of the narrow-lipped drinkers! It’s a metal cylinder inside a round, metal, narrow-lipped dish. And they were all squeezing into the space between the edge of the dish and the central cylinder. 

My sister thanked me for letting her know when we were going to Devon, and she said she’d try and meet us down there. That was a nice surprise, as she usually works throughout the summer, leading walking holidays. I did think my brother was more likely to say he was coming, but then again, he usually likes to turn up out of the blue and surprise us that way, and hope he still gets there before we do anything!

I gathered together my notes and my materials for the next novella and stuffed them into a folder so I could carry them into the living room and work on them in there if I felt like it. Then I brought the washing in.

The magic bakery returns

A few years ago I stumbled across a book called The Magic Bakery by Dean Wesley Smith. Originally written in 2017, this book turned on a lightbulb inside my head and enabled me to see copyright in a whole different glow. 

One of the first things I did, after reading this book, was start my own magic bakery. And in one 12-month period, I published around 56 books: short stories; collections; novellas; novels; and non-fiction books. Fifty-six of ‘em. I’ve added to them since, but those books now provide me with a steady trickle of income. Passive income.

Well, the magic bakery is back, but this time Smith is updating it, chapter by chapter, first on his website, then in a class, and then in a new and updated book. Here’s the new introduction, and here’s the first chapter. 

I’ll carry on linking to the chapters, as they appear, so that you guys have some understanding of what I’m banging on about when I persist in talking about my magic bakery. And I’ll repeat this bit of blurb every time for first-time readers. 

For those of you who’d prefer to read them as Smith posts them himself, rather than when I get around to it, you can go straight to his website here.

This man has single-handedly changed the way I work and the way I think about self-publishing and copyright. His wife’s a bit good anorl (and all…).