Wednesday 24 September 2025: Ducks in a row

I’m still doing a lot of catching up from all that faffing last week with covers and illustrations and publications and so on. One day I may have all my ducks in a row and just be able to sit down to work and get on with it without having to get a search party out for the latest version of something or having to check that it is the latest version. One day, but not just yet, eh?

Yesterday I was up on time, but I didn’t make it to my desk on time. I did a lot of work via my phone. Some of it catching up with news stories, some of it publishing work for the book that was published on Monday. Because it was only uploaded the day before, the confirmations started to come in overnight. And once it was confirmed that it was being published, I was able to go on to Books2Read and update the links, including collecting one from Google Play Books.

One thing I do now every morning over breakfast, on weekdays, is catch up on BlueSky posts. I try to do that in just one sitting every day, rather than keep checking in throughout the day. So I did that as well.

The rest of my phone work was creating the 3 tiers of membership on my Patreon, for which I also had to decide what the benefits were. I ended up with a basic supporter, for general support and a short story 4 weeks before it appears on the website, a regular supporter, for pdfs and epubs of the bookazine plus articles about writing, including the monthly ideas article, and a ninja supporter, for serialised books ahead of publication and full access to my entire archived content. There will also be the occasional completely free-for-all item. 

All I have on there at the moment are 2 completely free items: a bit about me, and a short story. The short story will also appear on here around 4 weeks after it’s appeared on the Patreon, but only for one week, then it’s coming down from here again, but it will stay on the Patreon. At the time I was working on it over breakfast, though, I still only had the one free item, the bit about me. 

I also only have one tier of membership that’s live at the moment, and that’s the basic grass roots membership for £1 a month. Regular membership is £3 a month, which is the recommended figure. Ninja membership is £5 a month. I don’t know how that converts to dollars because there are taxes and admin fees added to the £3 and £5 memberships. I think the grass roots membership is tax free but I don’t know if it’s admin free.

I decided that it was time I got dressed. I put a washload through and I emptied the dishwasher as well, but I didn’t feed the birds. They’d only been fed late in the afternoon the day before, but they’d still managed to pick everything clean. 

Once at my desk, I uploaded the story to Patreon and created some graphics to add to the collections that will gradually go live as I populate them. The only collection at the moment is free content. I have a draft collection too for Friday fiction. That will convert into something for the weekend when it morphs over here for the week. I had a play around with the look of the Patreon page and grabbed the link to add to my link tree.

Next job was uploading the short story to here and scheduling it to post in 4 weeks.  Then I did yesterday’s blog post, which took longer than necessary because I was doing it from memory again. Once that was done, I caught up on friends’ blog posts. I checked an upcoming study along on Teachable. I’d expect the advance reading to have been up there a few weeks ago, as this one is supposed to start on 14 October. But at the moment it’s all tumbleweeds. 

I do know they’ve been very busy with one thing or another, but when this happened before it was suddenly pulled because, I think, they didn’t get enough take-up for the in-person workshop at the same time. I was looking forward to it, though, because it’s time travel and I’m about overdue for a Toni and Bart time travel story.

At some point I had to step away from the faffing and get on with some work. I have a novella to write this week, and I have 2 more appointments: the light treatment education at the hospital, and the funeral on Friday. That doesn’t leave me with very many hours in which to do my work. Fortunately, I have until next Tuesday to submit the novella. I did a bit of brainstorming, because I still didn’t know which novella I wanted to write, and every time I ran a random number generator to help me choose which protagonist to use, I turned my nose up at the result…

I at least wrote this one at the end of the day yesterday, so I only had to dredge up my memory for a few hours. Today, I’ll write it as I go along. Or I will when I get back from the hospital. With a brand-new Patreon to announce, I also have a newsletter pending…

Finally I rattled off the two blog posts for the upcoming publication days and scheduled them to post. I thought I’d done next week’s, but I must have forgotten. Something I also thought I’d already done was the graphics. At least I had done the one for the bookazine. I just didn’t have one for next week’s. Duh!