Wednesday 9 July 2025: More faffing

Before I went into hospital back at the beginning of March, I’d lost 8lb on the 16:8 ‘diet’. When I came out of hospital, I had to take it easy for 6 weeks. And the weight started to pile on again. When we got back from Stratford on Saturday, despite walking for more than 10,000 steps from Wednesday to Saturday (inc.), I was 9lb heavier than just before I went into hospital. Not only had I put all of the weight back on, I’d also gained an extra pound too.

We have a lot of rubbish food in the house at the moment that I’m loath to throw out. And when I say ‘rubbish’ food, I mean things like luxury ice lollies, sticky cakes, sweets, chocolate, crisps, full-fat cheese, full-fat cream, etc, etc. (Strawberries are very nice with full-fat cream…) But since we got home on Saturday, we’ve tried to stick to meal times while we get rid of this food.

I did another 10,000+ steps on Sunday with the dog, but as soon as I went back to work, the step-count has gone down. However, as of Tuesday morning, I’d managed to lose 3lb. In 3 days. We did a weekly shop when we got home on Saturday, with our minds set on emptying the cupboards and the freezer before we start to fill it up with fresh, healthy, low-fat food.

I do think that full-fat food is better for us and that the sugar industry did a lot to frame fat. But when there are people like me who lead very sedentary lives, I think low-fat is better.

Summer is the best time for me to lose weight because of all the lovely fresh fruit and veg that’s in season, and I’ve had salad every day this week. I’ve not had any bread at all. We’ve had fruit-based puddings. And we’ve been back to eating 16:8, something that is neither sustainable nor practical when we’re staying in a hotel room with breakfast included. (Although we can do it in the campervan.) But if I want to fit more activity in my life, then that new schedule I carefully worked out last week needs another tweak.

One one-hour segment needs to be for activity, whether that’s going for a walk around the (big) block, going to a class, watching a video at home, or something, although a class will also need time on either side to get there. Yes, pottering around every 50 minutes for 10 minutes helps. But I don’t think it’s enough. And had my weight not dropped by 3lb this week already, I would have been seriously thinking about going for a blood test. Maybe I still will. I’ll be keeping a close eye on it all.

Tuesday started on time. I finished watching a Christmas novella workshop video I’d left hanging, but instead of going straight into the Christmas novella, I started work on the bookazine, thinking that sorting out Story #1 would be quick and easy…

Hah! 

Well, it was easy enough. But I didn’t have the book cover illustration. So off I pootled to Canva to have a play. This is a Mavis Braithwaite story, and I wanted a suitable picture of ‘Mavis’ because I think she may be a series character and I like the pictures to look the same on the front of every cover. So I played and played and searched and hunted until I had about a dozen.

Then I had to make the cover. I’m trying to make my covers in Affinity now, and that still takes a bit longer than in Canva, but once I have them, I just keep using the same template. I have a template for the Wordsworth Shorts, though, so it was easy enough to drop the artwork into the template. 

I’m still paying for a Canva premium subscription, which is £99 a year (or it was last year), so I’m using as many resources there as I can before cancelling the subscription. I do need a new image library, which will require another subscription. But at the moment my subscription includes picture licences and all of the other professional features on Canva. 

I went onto the website to update the blog page, which took a lot of time because the internet kept dropping out. So every time I did one thing, I had to save it. Unfortunately, I’d already done a lot of work when this happened the first time and I had to do it all again. I uploaded the new images for ‘coming soon’, and immediately noticed I’d made the bookazine cover in the wrong size file. So I had to go and do that again in the correct size file. 

While I was there, I made the covers for all the stories appearing in the next bookazine, including a new cover for the story from the archives. I like the image, though, so I kept that. I just dropped the old image into the new Wordsworth Shorts template. I deleted the two old size files that were still on there, once I’d made sure I had all the covers in the correct size files.

And then I wondered about the Stevie Beck/Horvale covers. I do like them, but they don’t pop as much as the other covers. So I created a novelette template and tried Stevie Beck and the Body in the Lake out. Then I remembered that Nettie Campbell gets her own novella covers that aren’t in the Wordsworth Shorts/Novelette/Flash Fiction brand, so why shouldn’t Stevie Beck? 

Mavis Braithwaite is a short story character, so I’m more than happy for her to use the Shorts brand. Marcie Craig is a novel character, with some short stories. Her novels have their own brand, the short stories use the Shorts brand. And the Rainbow Chronicles have their own brand too, but those are novels as well. (I used the great novella challenge to write the 3 parts of Catch the Rainbow but I’ll be stitching them together as one novel.)

So I was playing and faffing and musing and so on when, suddenly, the poet called to say he was on his way home. It was 5pm and all I’d done again all day was faff. 

Today I need to seriously look at the schedule, move some things along so I’m not trying to still do too much in one day. One day (one day), I’ll be able to work on one thing at a time until I run out of steam and then move onto another job while the original job rests and percolates. For now, I still have to multi-task and do several jobs at a time, because I’m already into that routine. 

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 twelve. 

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.