Tuesday 18 November 2025: Back to the beginning

On Saturday I had to work. I still had that editing job to do and send off to be set and I wanted it off my desk sooner rather than later. Plus, I’d promised the next author on the list that I’d be starting his book today. The poet went and did the shopping while I worked, but no, spaniel wanted to play so I had to put my rain coat on and go outside and play with him and the puppy. It was peeing down.

When the poet got back, we had something to eat, put the shopping away, and then he took over dog duties. Once he’d worn them out a bit, he did a big electrical tidy job that’s needed doing since we got here, but as the puppy thinks the cables are the best game in the world ever, it had to be done *now*. 

I carried on with the editing until I lost the light, then I got down to the business of ensuring all of my writers’ guides are on the Kindle, the Kobo and Apple Books (desktop). I’m going back to the beginning with my writing, by re-reading some of those old favourite writing guides and course books. I’m going to do as many of the exercises as I think might be useful for producing longer pieces that can actually go somewhere. I can’t stand writing exercises for exercise sake…

I’ve started with a Teach Yourself book, Get Started in Creative Writing by Stephen May, and Lawrence Block’s good old standard From Plot to Print to Pixel. I have an exercise book and a pen tin, and I packed a satchel with these study materials, plus the food and allergies diary, my regular A5 notebook that goes everywhere anyway, and the Kobo. I still need a charger in there for the Kobo, but the study bag is pretty much packed and ready to go wherever. 

On Sunday we both did some baking. I made some pumpkin muffins while he made an apple pie. We still had one serving each left from the plum crumble he’d made on Friday, which would do for our tea. But the apple pie would last us into the week as well. I put a couple of washloads through and hung them up while he cleaned 2 more carpets. Of course, we had to test both the muffins and the pie, which filled us up a bit more than usual. And they were both delicious.

I should have gone back to work for the rest of the day, but I really couldn’t be bothered to give up the rest of my Sunday. I knew the work wouldn’t be finished and that I’d still be doing it this week. So I went back to the reading/study for the rest of the day. I *will* still start the new edit today, because I promised. But there’s nothing stopping me from finishing an earlier one as well. One is a hard copy from a standing start, the other is just transferring edits from page to screen. Different parts of the brain.

It carried on raining until Sunday night/Monday morning when it eventually got too cold to carry on, and I did think the thin drizzle looked like fine snow very late on Sunday night. We do have snow forecast later this week, at the tail end of Storm Claudia, but we hadn’t drained down the campervan yet and we didn’t want another burst pipe on our hands. It may have been fine snow, I don’t know, but it was more likely thin drizzle.

Monday started badly after a disturbed night from the puppy. He’s okay, he’s just getting bigger and he wanders more and gets into more mischief all by himself. He had me up 3 times in the night, so the poet got up with him the 4^th time (he hadn’t heard him the other 3 times as he’s a deeper sleeper) (and yes, I do prod him awake if I’ve had enough, and he takes over). 

After playing with the dogs for a bit in the garden, I started today’s blog and sourced the images for the graphic. The poet was working from home too and at dinner time he went and took the campervan for a drive, giving the battery a good charge, and he drained the freshwater tank outside the house. That gave us peace of mind at least.

I updated my food allergies diary, I contacted WMG Publishing Workshops about the lifetime workshops subscription, and I cracked on with that editing job. After a 2-hour session I took a break and did some ebook work on my Apple Books app. 

At the weekend, when I made sure I had my entire writers’ guide library uploaded, I made the mistake of ‘selecting all’ of the books in my reading directory…I forgot that there are also 5 directories within that directory with the audit trail of which ebooks are on which reader. Epubs on Kobo, Mobis on Kindle (now obsolete), uploaded to Google Play, and so on…and some epub books were repeated in each directory. A LOT, in fact. And instead of recognising them as duplicates, my Apple Books grabbed every single one of them, meaning there were up to 5 versions of some books, and my iCloud, which I never use but which holds all my Apple epub files, sent a warning that it was almost full! (I do have nearly 2,000 ebooks…)

So in the break, I went through my Apple Books app on the Mac and deleted all the duplicates. Every. Single. One. It took me a full hour.

By the time I got back to my editing job, I needed the daylight bulb pointing at my copy and the desk lamp pointing at my keyboard. It is a hard-wired glow in the dark gaming keyboard and I am a touch typist, but I don’t necessarily know where all the symbols are. I know my QWERTY and numbers 1 to 0, but I can’t remember where everything else is, so I need the desk lamp pointing at it when my corner of the office is suddenly quite dark.

I wrapped the house up for the evening (pulled curtains, turned lights on, closed doors), and by the time I got back to my desk it was pitch dark outside. But at least I could still carry on for a bit with my daylight and desk lamps.

Today it’s more of the same. More editing at least, not the ebooks work.