Thursday 5 June 2025: This is a long one!

Well, we had another holiday and I scheduled 7 posts to publish, both while we were away and right after we came back. They all seem to have worked, I don’t think any missed. Yay!

We had a week away in North Devon to go and scatter my parents’ ashes at one of their favourite beaches. My sister was able to meet us there on the Sunday, but as we hadn’t heard from my brother yet, and I was now out of signal, we saved some just in case he showed. My sister kept me in touch once she went back home, and my brother sent a message that he couldn’t come after all. So the job was left to the poet and me to finish on our last evening.

We went down via an overnight stop at Hereford, as North Devon is such a long way away. We could do it in one day, but we’d have to leave very early in the morning to get there in time to check in, and we don’t really do ‘very early in the morning’. So we went via Hereford for one night. As we were doing really well for time from Hereford to North Devon, we arranged to meet my sister before going on to the site.

My sister came and had a look at the campervan and had a cup of tea with us before she headed home. She’d come down especially to see us, but had work on Monday, or she would have come back to the site with us. We spent the rest of the week in Croyde and had a proper, chill-out holiday. We spent a day on the site and walked down to the beach and back one day, We walked down to Croyde village and had a day there. And we walked into Croyde Bay resort, which is along a bit from Croyde. Our last full day was once again spent on site.

On Friday we headed home, via Hereford, where we stayed overnight. A 3½-hour journey took us more than 6 hours, the traffic was so bad, and the poet was shattered by the time we got to Hereford. And that was our holiday. We had a lovely rest but managed to walk more than we usually do. The weather was fairly kind. We had 2 days of 40mph+ winds and a bit of rain. But the breeze was warm and even when it was raining it was humid.

Fortunately, the final leg of the trip was much quicker and while he cleaned the van, I put stuff away and made a shopping list. We took the van back to the lockup and did the shopping on the way home. 

Then I finished Book 7 for the great novella challenge, Over the Rainbow, which is actually Part 2 of the bigger Catch the Rainbow.

On Sunday I made a start on the washing while the poet adapted and fitted 12 roller blinds in the conservatory. That took him just over 6 hours, but he felt as though he’d accomplished something. The conservatory is now shielded from the worst of the sunshine and it feels a lot more private, even though we’re not really overlooked. The blinds are thermal and blackout, but they were cheap enough that we don’t mind leaving them behind when we move, if we have to.

I also carried on with the Rainbow Chronicles, writing a missing scene for Book 2 and a couple of scenes for Book 3, End of the Rainbow. I updated my 36-project spreadsheet for June and I did my diary for this week. I emptied all the bins in the house as well, emptied the dishwasher, and topped up the bird feeders and baths/drinkers. 

It was a very busy weekend.

Monday dawned and I was up with the poet, who had an hour-long drive ahead of him and a presentation to prepare and deliver once he got there. My day started with the final week of the advanced depth workshop and my first day of the Christmas cosy novella workshop. The first Zoom call for this workshop was yesterday, but it was 9pm UK time, so if I didn’t make it, I might watch the recording instead. Next week, it’s at 8pm UK time, which is when we’ll be at the dinner table. 

In between jobs, I put 2 washloads through, hung 2 washloads out, brought 2 washloads in, and I topped up the bird baths and drinkers again. We had a drop of rain on Sunday but nowhere near enough. I noticed another starling with a bad leg, this time one of the chicks. Again, it was holding it up rather than letting it dangle, so we think it might be another temporary injury. Such a shame it’s one of the babies, though. It’s barely learned how to walk and now it has to learn how to balance on one leg.

I printed off a new workbook for the cosy mystery workshop, and I did some Monkey Dust admin. They have a gig in 2 weeks and I had to share the posters, on FB and on IG, and create the event. When I went onto Facebook, I noticed that the venue was charging for this gig. So I changed the posters, shared them again, and updated the event. 

I wrote another 2 scenes for End of the Rainbow (Book 3) and started to refresh my memory for Project Management for Writers. To get me back in the mood to start writing Gate 3. And I started the new client edit.

It was a long first day back, but all of my days this week will be long. I just have to ensure I take my full hour-long breaks and that I take them away from my desk.

Tuesday started better, even though the poet was working at home. We were both up on time and we were both at our desks in time. Two more washloads were put through and hung up, after 2 loads we did at the weekend were put away. The 2 loads that were on the line the day before had already been put away. And I fed the birds some dry food, because it was actually raining when we got up. (Yay! We need rain.)

My first job of the day was Week 1 of the applied depth workshop, which builds on the writing with depth and the advanced depth workshops I revised before we went away. 

I worked on Project Management for Writers, familiarising myself with the first book. I didn’t finish reading it, but I did notice a typo and I had to locate the project management Scrivener file. As I haven’t worked on it since before switching to the Mac, it was on my old portable hard drive and not on the desktop or the new portable hard drive. Because the old hard drive is Windows, I can’t work on files on the drive. I have to copy them to the desktop and work on them there. 

I changed a few things for an updated version of Gate 1. I changed the copyright page to include © 2025 for both of us (the project management books are co-written) and I added in the ‘under no circumstances’ bit about scraping and training AI. I replaced the ‘also by’ page. I added a note to the introduction regarding Scrivener and moving from Windows to Mac. And I replaced the ‘catch up with Diane’ info to include just the website, the newsletter and my linktree. 

Then I asked the poet (aka my project management coach) to reinstate my project management murder board when he can. I want the 5 Gates back on there, but I also want space for a ‘key’ so I can write on which colour magnet applies to which project. I’ll carry on reading Gates 1 and 2 and updating them as I go. I’ll reissue the boxed set as well with the updated material before releasing Gate 3 as a standalone. 

The next boxed set will be Gates 3 and 4. The one after that will be Gate 5 and the writealong, which just happens to be The Beast Within: a Marcie Craig mystery. The final book will be the 5-book omnibus plus the writealong. But I might also offer the omnibus without the writealong for those who don’t particularly want it. The writealong will also be released as a Marcie Craig book in its own right, for those who don’t want the project management part.

I was really in the spirit of it all by then, and I updated my Nobo Power Board too with all of the novellas I’ve written to date for the challenge, plus the remaining ones I have to choose from for the rest. I have 7 Lady Mathilda books on there, 5 Nettie Campbell books, 4 Stevie Beck books, 3 Rainbow Chronicles books, and a standalone. I only need 12 books for the challenge in all, so there should be plenty to choose from there. 

Seven of them are already written, of course, so those have moved along the Power Board to ‘writing’, ‘cooling’ and ‘revising’. Two are in ‘planning’, 2 are in ‘writing’, and the rest are in ‘percolating’. 

Then I turned to the pre-writing for Book 8 of the great novella challenge. It was a toss up between 2 books: Lady Mathilda and the Baronet, which introduces the Lady Mathilda Investigates… series; and Christmas at Whitehorse Farm, which is Book 2 in the Nettie Campbell series. 

And the winner is…Christmas at Whitehorse Farm!

I’ll be working on this for the Christmas cosy novella workshop during June as well.

I tidied up the great novella challenge Scrivener file and made sure I had all the same characters and places from Book 1. I changed the colour of the font to blue, and as I worked through the characters, I turned the font black for those who are also in Book 2. 

In the future, with the likes of Amazon changing their royalty rates for paperbacks, I’ll likely write longer stories again and publish thicker books. But while I work through the Great Novella Challenge, I’ll keep the novellas between 15,000 and 30,000 words, although ideally I’d like them to be closer to 40,000 words. I already revised my pricing structure for ebooks. I’ll create a new pricing structure for paperbacks.

The gas engineer came to change our meters. (We have our gas and our electric from the same place.) They’d informed us that we were due to have ‘smart metres’ installed, but we already had them. When they checked, our smart metres had come to the end of their lives. So the engineer had to come out and change them. When he got here, we both turned off our desktop computers (the poet had to excuse himself from a Teams meeting) and switched on our laptops instead so we could at least carry on working. There was no internet while the power was off, so he couldn’t rejoin his meeting. 

My next job was to come in and update this blog post, by which time it was already just over 1,800 words. Another job on the list was one of the last 2 outstanding book reviews. So I wrote that up, shared it everywhere, made it yesterday’s blog post, and updated my Trello board.

And as I was nudging the 2,000-word mark by now on today’s post, I decided to end it there. Wednesday and Thursday will appear on Friday. Pictures for the next week or so will be from our North Devon holiday.