Tuesday 23 September 2025: Mixed emotions

Friday was mostly about getting the last 2 stories for the next bookazine proof-read and formatted. But before I could start on those, I had to write up, choose an image, and post a blog post. Well, I didn’t ‘have’ to, but you know what I mean. I also had my weekly finances to do and my weekly backup, as well as today’s blog post.

Once all of the admin-y stuff was out of the way I turned to the novella and the novel, and I created a new Scrivener master file for the Stevie Beck Horvale mysteries. That took longer than I expected as I also dragged across the templates for the cosy mystery novella (40,000 words), what I call the cosy mystery novelette (24,000 words), and the Save the Cat template (60,000+ words). The cosies could easily be for 60,000+ words too. I just have to redo the maths per scene/chapter/part (or act, but I work in parts rather than acts).

I ended up spending the rest of the day on the novel. This consisted of reading it through (15,000 words), making any changes as I went, and making the formatting consistent with the rest of the bookazine. I wanted to get the novella done as well, but that was another 15,000 words and there really are so many words you can read in a single day. I can happily sit and read 30,000 words in a day, but editing and proofreading as I go take a bit longer, and I didn’t have a whole day left.

On Saturday, Monkey Dust made their very sad announcement. They’d been waiting until the family gave them the go ahead, and the family had made their announcements on Thursday of last week. The band wanted to give those time for the right people to see before making their own announcement, which was that they’d suddenly and tragically lost their bass player and very good friend while he was on holiday with his wife and friends at the end of August. It was totally unexpected and a complete shock to everyone.

The poet drafted the post and shared it on Facebook. Then we all shared it on our own profiles. I grabbed it and shared it on the Monkey Dust Instagram. And when the dust settled a bit, we added the funeral details to the main post. At least 2 members of the band were sure to acknowledge every single response throughout the day. I know the poet did quite a few of these, but I’m not sure if it was the drummer or the lead guitarist who did the others. We’re all admins on the Monkey Dust FB account.

So, so sad.

Son #2 came to collect grand-doggy #1, and we had a good hour with him having a natter, changing the world, etc. He was going to take the dog for a walk on his way home, but the heavens opened and it didn’t stop for 2 whole days. (He did say he’d wait until it had stopped raining…)

The plan for the rest of the day was to do more work, but we had quite a bit of shopping to do as well. We had new trugs to look for, as the current garden trug can’t be washed properly, and I know I had a plastic one, once upon a time, but I can’t find it. It’s probably in the shed under a load of other stuff. Or hidden in the greenhouse beneath all of the rampaging brambles and ivy in there. Needless to say, we couldn’t find a single trug, despite visiting a dedicated garden centre too.

We had bird food to buy. We had to go to the butcher. And we had a regular weekly shop too. When we got in and put it all away we were both shattered. And after everything else that we did on Saturday, I honestly didn’t feel like doing any work.

Which left Sunday.

I made an apricot cake for our puddings first, to get that out of the way. And then I settled down to work on the novella for the bookazine. And I vanished down another very dark hole as I really wasn’t 100% happy with the covers for the Stevie Beck/Horvale cosy mystery novellas. I went in search of images while the poet started to brush up on his art skills. He can draw and paint, but he’s never had much practice with digital art. In the end he conceded that while he’s definitely going to learn it all, he knows it’s going to take a long time.

Once I’d settled on the new covers (again!), and updated the covers of the bookazines to reflect the new covers, I cracked on with reading the novella, again editing it as I went along and reformatting it.

On Monday I was able to upload everything to Draft2Digital and I made the graphics in Affinity. Once it was up there, I uploaded it to Google Play Books. And I’m delighted to say that Words Worth Reading: Issue Five is in production and will be published on Monday 6 October. Yay!

I had a dental appointment on Monday too, which took up a couple of hours – first to get there and come back, but also for the time spent waiting for my appointment and then going in. The good news is I don’t have to have anything done this time, so it’s back to the hygienist in 3 months and my next check up in 6 months. Yay again!

I started to fanny around with organising a pdf of the bookazine, both for newsletter subscribers and for on the Patreon. The problem with the pdfs that Draft2Digital make for us is they’re black and white and they don’t have a proper cover. So I was trying to work out how I could make a pdf. When I started the bookazine, I made it in Affinity and I could export it as a full colour pdf with cover. But that was 3 years ago and I couldn’t find the original files. They were created in Windows anyway, though, and now I have a Mac, so I probably had to do them all again.

I made a start, but oh, what a faff! Having to make a master file from scratch, put the text boxes in, page numbers, headers and footers, and images. And I started to despair ever making such a rod for my own back in the first place.

And then I remembered…Scrivener can export as a pdf. All I had to do was slip the cover in as the first file, and away I could go. So I made pdfs for Issues 3, 4 and 5. I already had Issue 0 and Issue 1. I still have to do Issue 2, but I ran out of time and my tea was on the table.