Tuesday 16 December 2025: The weekend

This post also appears on Patreon.

Saturday seems to have vanished into a puff of smoke. I think we were busy, but as I write this on Monday afternoon, I’m struggling to remember what happened.

I know I didn’t do any of the work I’d promised myself I’d do. I remember the poet went out in the morning to the butcher and the home supplies shop. And I know we went out in the afternoon to do the shopping. We weren’t gone for long on either occasion as we still don’t want to leave the dogs for very long on their own.

Ah yes, and on our way to the supermarket we had to go and pick up tent pegs. Yes, you read that right. Tent pegs.

Before the dogs came we had a post and wire fence put around the inside perimeter of the back garden. This was to ensure that the puppy couldn’t get out. Dachshunds are notorious for wriggling through the smallest gap at the best of times; a puppy would be almost impossible to contain.

The fence has been doing quite well, but something, a hedgehog or a fox or a cat, has started to dig from the other side and is pushing the mesh through in places, leaving not only a gap, but also an interesting scent leading away from the garden. So we had to go and get tent pegs so we could peg down the mesh in between the posts where the wildlife is getting through.

When we got back from the supermarket, after we had something to eat, that was the first job the poet did while it was still light enough to see. And then we put the shopping away.

I know what I spent most of Sunday doing, and that wasn’t editing either. Or posting short stories to Patreons. And we also didn’t do any baking.

We went out to the shops again because I needed some planning materials for the new year. I wanted a calendar that had room for me to write on and a cheap week-to-view diary. This time we took the dogs for a ride with us, as we visited my mother-in-law on the way, but I sat in the car with them while the poet went into the shop.

He came out with a cheap week-to-view diary, but the wall calendar he found, a family planner, was actually too good for me to scribble all over. So that’s gone away to be used in the proper manner in the new year. Instead, I found some calendar printouts I’d started on to plan the Patreon short stories and when those short stories will then appear on here.

I also had an A4 hard-back notebook in which I listed every book I’ve published since Diary of a Scaredy Cat. There were one short of 90 of them. Ninety books. Short stories, writers’ guides, novels, novellas, collections, bookazines. Ninety. And then I listed all the books I already know I’ll be publishing in the coming months.

There are already 25, and that doesn’t include the novellas and novels I also want to polish and publish or the writers’ guides still to be written and published. It does include the rest of the project management series, including an extra volume on project management tools, part of which the poet will be writing as a project management champion.

Every time I publish a bookazine, I need 1 novella, 2 short stories and a novel extract. So all of my short stories are pegged for there if they haven’t already been sent to a specific market. Once they’ve been accepted or published in a specific market, they go into the bookazine as an ‘archive’ short story and count as one of the 4 short stories.

The bookazine is currently quarterly and, at the moment, the archive short stories run out in about 7 issues. If I don’t have any more successes between then and now, the archive slot will become a regular short story slot.

I still need short stories to fill all of those slots. I need novellas. And I need novels. All need to be written at least to first draft. And the bookazine is the first publication to go into the publishing planner. Once the stories have appeared in the bookazine, they’re published in the following weeks. So those are the next things to go in the planner. In the gaps I have things like the project management books and the novellas I wrote for the great novella challenge this past year, and any novels already serialised in the bookazine.

I need a new novel to be ready in 2 issues time. I’ve just put Issue SIX into production, and I’m working on filling Issue SEVEN. Six will be published in January. Seven will be published in April. I need a new novel ready to be serialised by October 2026.

So that’s my starting situation. I need to work backwards from there. And that’s what I spent the rest of Sunday doing.

I should have finished for the holiday last Friday, but I still have the last client edit of the year to complete and I want to play with the writing and publishing calendar. At the time of writing, my holiday may start tomorrow, or it may start on Thursday.

Let’s see how the start of this week goes first…