Friday 6 June 2025: Friday already!

We noticed another casualty among our garden birds. One of the blackbirds, a male, but not sure how old he is, has lost his tail feathers. He looks a bit stumpy, but he’s managing well enough. We haven’t seen Captain Beaky or Dave since we got back off holiday, and we haven’t seen Scruffy since before nesting began. I hope they’re all all right.

On Wednesday, the poet left early and when my alarm went off I made the mistake of hitting the snooze button. It was fine, I only waited for 1 10-min snooze, but I did sit up in bed then doing my social media scrolling. We don’t take smart devices into the conservatory, and since the poet put the blinds up at the weekend, we’ve used it every day.

I left my phone in the kitchen while I topped up the bird feeders, and cleaned 2 of them out as we’ve had rain and it all got a bit soggy. Then I took my dirty cuppa and my Kobo ink reader into the conservatory.

By then I was running almost an hour late and when I got to my desk, I still had to finalise and schedule yesterday’s blog post. I made a mistake and posted it straight away, but noticed immediately and deleted it again. Hopefully it worked yesterday.

My next job was Week 2 of the applied depth workshop revision. And then I had another book review to write, bringing me bang up to date. I scheduled it on here for next week, but I posted it everywhere else on Wednesday when it was done.

I played around with my Nobo Power Board, removing the row for ‘articles’, as I’m not really writing articles any more. Now I have 6 slots for short stories, novellas and novels, but only 5 slots for non-fiction books as I don’t write as many of those as I do the others.

After saying we hadn’t seen Captain Beaky (the wood pigeon with the deformed beak), down he came in all his splendour to feast on a pile of bird food. He’s not gobbling as much as the other wood pigeons, but he is eating, and by the look of him he’s eating enough.

To claw back some time, I had my midday breakfast at my desk and worked through. I sat in my reading chair and carried on with my project management refresher. I made a few more changes, to bring it up to date. But when I went to make some of them, I noticed the Scrivener file wasn’t the file that had been used to create the book. And nor could I be certain I had the latest Word file available.

I had to go to Draft2Digital and download the Word document they have on file, and I edited that, then copied and pasted the chapters into Scrivener. We can do that now without the formatting going all over the place.

As I’d started, I thought I may as well finish, then I uploaded the new edited file to D2D, adding ‘Revised and updated’ to the description. I had the right price for the ebook. I made a new paperback too, but had to change the price on that to £9.99/$9.99. It’s £2/$2 more than what it was and I’m not sure people will want to pay that. But it *is* a business book, so maybe they still will.

I also requested a change of publisher name from Baggins Bottom Books to Baggy Bottom Books. Too many people think the Baggins part is Hobbit-related, but it isn’t. I prefer Baggy Bottom, though.

With that all done, I then went to Google Play Books to update the book there, and it wasn’t even on there. So I added a new book, uploaded the epub file and the cover, and foolishly added a £9.99 price to that. But they only sell the ebooks and the ebook is still £3.99, so I had to go in and change it. Fortunately, it was still in limbo.

The poet got home from work and Son #2 called to ask if we could look after grand-doggy #1 a couple of times. Of course, we said yes.

My eyes felt gritty and I was a bit tired, so I called it a day.

On Thursday I was up and at my desk on time and the first job of the day was to share the gig list post. Draft2Digital sent me an email confirming the change of publisher name. And next up was Week 3 of the applied depth workshop revision.

When I tried to have a quick look at Facebook at the end of the workshop, in between that job and the next job, Safari wasn’t having it. I’ve had this problem a few times with Safari and I’m not sure what’s causing it, but if I want to get onto FB badly enough, I have to empty my cache and delete my entire history. Which of course adds time on in the first place, but also when I have to re-log in to everything.

So I went in search of Firefox, found it, downloaded it, familiarised myself with it again, liked it, copied all my bookmarks over, and off I went. I don’t like having too many ‘things’ from one place anyway. So because I have a Mac, I’m really much happier not having Safari. When I had Windows, I didn’t have Edge, I had Opera. And I rarely use the Google browser because so much other stuff is on Google. I like things to be from different places, and so long as they’re all compatible, I’m a very happy bunny.

It’s another reason I didn’t want Word/Office and Pages. The Word/Office reasons are now far too many to list, but Pages just isn’t great for me. And it’s Apple.

With the new browser, I chose to go in and open all of my study websites: WMG Publishing (Dean Smith and Kris Rusch), Indie Writing (cosy mystery novellas), Writing Mastery (Jessica Brody and Save the Cat), as well as Deadlines for Writers (12 Stories in 12 Months).

Then I did the same for my regular daily sites (webmail, social media, Trello) and my book publishing sites (Draft2Digital, Books2Read, etc).

I discovered that in order to read a book at my desk, all I had to do was open the epub file in Apple books, so that was good and I copied my entire library over, or those already moved to Kobo and/or Google Play. Add my BookFunnel to those, and I have plenty of ereaders to choose from now. Plus the NetGalley shelf and Adobe, if I want, but the books expire on both of those so I never use either. The point is, I’m not tied to any one, and different readers work better on different devices.

And then, puff! Just like that, the day was gone. What a rabbit hole that was. Although it was all useful stuff and it all needed doing. I just had other things that also needed doing yesterday.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before or not, but this week the editing client sent me a new book to edit, which will be Book 3 currently outstanding.

The poet came home, had a shower and went straight out again to band practice. Daughter-in-law #1 brought Grand-doggy #1 over before carrying on to pick Son #2 up from gym. And the poet picked up a takeaway for our tea on his way home.

We’ll be taking the dog back over the weekend, doing our shopping and, hopefully, maybe getting into the garden. Whatever you’re up to, have a good one!

The magic bakery

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 chapter three.

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 rather read them as Smith posts them himself, rather than when I get around to it, you can go straight to his website here.