Tuesday 20 January 2026: Weekend catch-up

Grab yourself a cuppa and pull up a chair…

Friday

Because my appointments at the hospital had been messed up, Friday’s appointment was quite early in the morning. The poet had a couple of Teams meetings booked for this time, which would have been fine if the appointment was at the original time, but now they clashed. So I was going to either drive myself while he attended the meetings at his desk, or drive us both while he attended the meetings via his phone. 

As it turned out, he drove, and he attended the meetings via his phone. It worked out all right. He only cut them off once, which was when I called to let him know I was on my way out so he could come and pick me up.

I had a good session, but I think I forgot to take my watch off. I don’t know how that will affect either the watch or me going in with or without it in future, but I don’t want to mention it in case it gets the nurse into trouble for not reminding me. I think the watch is okay. As for it affecting future treatments…well, that’s a bit of a mystery.

When we got back, and we came straight back, I did a lot of legal and admin stuff regarding the good news we had earlier in the week. I played with the dogs in the garden, but I stayed in the safety of the conservatory, as I’m not supposed to go out into the sun after my treatment, even if it’s cloudy. And I finished and published Friday’s blog post. 

I created a contract on Upwork for that former client who contacted me out of the blue. For 6 books.

Then it was revision of the next workshop in the series, Advanced Depth. But the very first video of this workshop, in the first week, directs us to a set of lectures on the Stages of a Fiction Writer, which were thrown in as a freebie to the Advanced Depth workshop. (He gives us a discount code that gets us in for free.) This lecture made the session longer than it usually is, but it was still revision as I’d already ‘done’ it, I’m just refreshing my memory before moving on.

Watching the lecture again made me want to open up a notebook just for short stories written on the hoof, with no planning. Or what he calls writing into the dark. One big thing he learned was that if he read a story out to a group he once belonged to, if anyone picked up on something and he agreed with them, instead of going back to *this* story to fix it, he applied it to the *next* story as *this* story had already gone out on its rounds. 

Dean Smith often challenges himself to write a short story every day. He ‘cycles back’ as he goes, rather than keep going back to something short to polish it to death.  When it’s finished, it gets one read-through and then it’s out on the market, either doing the rounds (as in the old days) or being indie-published. I wish I had that confidence.

Unfortunately, the puppy was in Little Shit mode throughout this study period, and he made an already long session twice the length it needed to be. He had bins over. He wrecked a pair of headphones. He kept asking to be let out just to run around the muddy garden with a stick. And he would not behave at all.

I didn’t get everything done on Friday, but it was a solidly busy day all the same. 

The weekend

We went out early Saturday morning to do the shopping before taking the mother-in-law out for her birthday. She likes to have chip shop fish as a treat, so we took her to a chip shop restaurant we hadn’t been to before that was recommended by her brother-in-law, the poet’s uncle. 

It wasn’t very busy there, but the food was delicious. She had her battered cod with mushy peas, the poet had battered cod with chips and mushy peas, and I had a steak and kidney pie with chips and mushy peas. For pudding the poet had a strawberry cheesecake, a teeny tiny thing in the middle of the biggest bowl in the world. I had banoffee and biscotti waffle with gelato ice cream. Mine was much bigger than his. 

On Sunday we were supposed to be taking the dogs for a walk with Son #2, but it was peeing down with freezing rain, I was just getting over my cough and the poet was just coming down with something. So we postponed that and had a day at home instead. I made a trifle for pudding for the next 3 days and a quick fruit cake. The poet made a loaf of bread.

Monday

We had a late night on Sunday but we still had to be up fairly early on Monday. We both had work to do and the poet had a Teams meeting first thing. Thankfully, it was a day off from the hospital, which opened up the morning to a lot more work. We started with our first cuppas of the day, then I played with the dogs while the poet had his meeting.

Once at my desk, first job was moving jobs I didn’t finish last week to this week. In fact, because I’m only working on a few big jobs at once it was much easier to just re-date the work I missed last week to the tail end of the project. 

I quickly wrote up yesterday’s blog post. It was a quick one anyway and one I should have squeezed in last week as it was only a publication day post. I had to locate the graphic files as I’ve opened a new working folder for 2026 and I have to go and find things like the Affinity files in the 2025 folder. 

When I did find them, I made sure I had the masters in the new 2026 directory, I made the new graphics, and I posted the news on here, on Patreon and on Instagram. 

I did another job I should have done on Friday, the weekly backup. But I didn’t do the last remaining job, weekly finances, as there isn’t a lot to do for last week so I’ll just update it all this Friday. And then I updated this week’s diary.

Finally with all of last week done, I started this week, beginning with continuing to update today’s blog post. I’d already done Friday. I had to add in the weekend and Monday so far. 

After my midday breakfast/brunch, the next job was to publish the next standalone short story, Deadly Deeds in Morecambe Bay, which is a Mavis Braithwaite story and another one that appeared in the latest issue of Words Worth Reading. Once it was done I went right away from it again before realising I could make the graphic at the same time I publish the book. So I pootled back to Affinity to make the FB and IG graphics for the publication day posts.

I updated my power spreadsheet, the one with the books to be published in order, and realised I’d published this one a few weeks early. I toyed with changing it again, but just decided to have 2 come out within a week of each other. This one comes out on 2 February, the next one, a valentine story, comes out on 9 February. At the moment, the next one due out is the April bookazine. Gosh, that comes around quickly. 

The April issue of the bookazine will carry the final instalment of Catch the Rainbow. This means 2 things:

1. I have to finish the end of the book
2. I need a new novel for the July issue…

[Gulp!] Looks like I need to schedule in The Beast Within…

I caught up with the day’s videos for the advanced depth workshop revision and was going to do some editing, but by this time the light was almost gone and I was tired. My eyes have been complaining lately and refusing to play ball after so many hours or so much screen time or something. We’re due optician’s appointments but it’s not at the top of our list at the moment. We really ought to get those booked in.

Son #2 had arrived by now for a quick visit, so I closed down and we all had a good hour or so putting the world to rights.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.