Wednesday
We had an unexpected sprinkling of snow on Tuesday night, which was nice to watch. It didn’t last long, though, as it was very wet and very quickly turned into sleet. By 9pm, it had all washed away and it was raining, but it was very thick rain.
The dogs let us sleep until 7:30am on Wednesday, but they were ready for their breakfast by 8am. This is a massive improvement. We had time for a cuppa and a few admin things for our respective work, then we were off out for appointment #27. The car park was very busy again, and so was the hospital, but it was a quick in and out.
The roofer was coming at noon and the poet had to go off to site, but the roofer called before the poet even arrived at site to say he wouldn’t be coming again due to the weather. It wasn’t snowing where he was, only down the road (we’re on high ground), so he was surprised when I told him that. However, it was drizzling and too dangerous for him to go up on the roof.
He has a flat roof to replace, a length of guttering, and some tiles. When he was up there last time, he said he was surprised we didn’t have roof leaks all over the place. I said, ‘How do you know we haven’t?’ I do believe I mentioned when he came to do his quote that the house needed a new roof, but he wouldn’t have it. Too keen to get the work so he came in cheap, I reckon. And now, I reckon, he’s regretting that decision.
I’d already caught up on all of my revision for the first 3 writing with depth stories. I was supposed to start the 4th one in the series on Tuesday, but I was still catching up. I tentatively put Week 1 and Week 2 together on Wednesday, half expecting to run out of time and end up carrying Week 2 over to Thursday. But I managed both weeks and the first assignment.
I created a work book for short stories in progress that I can take into the living room with me or it will fit in a shoulder bag I use for work. And I wrote out the 2 assignments in my current A5 touchy-feeling flexible-cover note book where I do brainstorming. That also fits in the work bag and I thought I’d keep the work bag with me in case I feel the urge to start writing something by hand.
I finally got going on one of the new client jobs, one of the proofreads, by creating the folder, downloading the file, moving it to the right folder, and saving a working copy. I had a quick look at the editor’s comments too, just to get a feel for it all. I should have done an hour on the client edit too, but I had to do some covers work instead…(see below).
I did the covers work for some new publications that are coming out next. I noticed the images on the website in the sidebar were out of date, but I needed to make 2 new covers first before doing the update. The next bookazine was one of those, the other was a flash fiction story I never published as a standalone back when I was doing my publishing challenge. It’s been in one of the Twee Tales volumes and in Twee Tales More, but for some reason it never got published as a standalone.
The other 2 covers were already done, a new Mavis Braithwaite and a new Stevie Beck. But when I moved the next one up to the ‘out now’ slot, it left only 1 cover below it, and I like at least 2. Now there are 4 again.
I saved the covers to both the short story folders for these 3 stories and the bookazine folder they’ll all appear in, so I have all of my assets for that in the same place, for a change.
Next, I’d almost forgot to import Wednesday’s blog post to Medium and add it to Instagram, so I did both of those, and I updated my 40-project spreadsheet with words written and number of pages to revise. Then I gathered up all of my writing books, closed the computer down, and moved into the comfort of the living room.
Thursday
Historically, Thursday has always been the worst day of my working week. I’m always really very tired by Thursday and I usually struggle to get things done. This Thursday, however, yesterday, I thought I was going to have quite a good day. How much of that is because the weeks in general haven’t been very good of late, who knows? But this week, Thursday felt like it was going to be a good day.
I went straight from dirty cuppa/quiet hour time to doggy play time to the newsletter, instead of dawdling and faffing and taking my time getting up.
We’d had a good night with the dogs. I think the poet took the puppy out at about 6:30am but I didn’t hear a peep out of either dog until almost 8am, which is when the spaniel seems to think his breakfast is due. Yesterday and the day before, though, the puppy didn’t seem to want his breakfast. Or not at 8am. He was still fast asleep when we dragged him into the kitchen.
The puppy barked at his breakfast on Wednesday and growled at it on Thursday. On Thursday, he only seemed interested in it when the spaniel started to steal it, and then he ate it. We will have to keep an eye on this.
It’s quite probable that after a good night’s sleep the puppy isn’t ready for his breakfast so early, being much more hungry after a day of excitement and exercise. But it’s also possible he may have a sore tooth or a tummy ache. So we’re keeping an eye on it. For now.
He’s due to be weighed at the vet so the vet can give him his next course of worms/ticks/flea treatment, and we’ll see if we can get him in after we’ve finished work today. If we’re still concerned, we’ll mention it to the vet.
So, after playing with them in the garden for a bit, the first job of the day was my newsletter. It went out yesterday, so subscribers should have received it by now. If not, do check your spam boxes. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can become one by following this link. Subscribers get a short story with every issue and access to the full newsletter archive as well as pdfs of the quarterly bookazine.
And then we nose-dived.
I had such wonderful plans. I was going to write up the assignment for Week 2 of the Research in Depth class and watch Week 3 videos. I was going to have an hour on the client edit and an hour on the client proofread. I was going to finish writing up today’s blog post. And it was all going to be nice and relaxed and leisurely and successful and productive…
An email from JetPack soon put paid to all of that load of malarkey.
Because my website was having more than 1,000 views a month I had to upgrade to a commercial plan…
Excuse me? A thousand views a month? I wasn’t sure I got that in a year. So off I pootled to check my stats and, sure enough, I’ve been clocking in just under 300 views per day. How could this be? I checked my other statcounter, the one I’ve been using since the year dot, and that was more like it with more realistic numbers. So I contacted JetPack to see what was going on.
I was attended to by a very friendly, very articulate, very polite robot. Yes, I could have asked for a person, but I would have needed to fill in a contact form for that. And anyway, me and the bot were getting on just fine. And he/she/it agreed that there was an unrealistic discrepancy but went through the motions with me anyway until eventually pointing me at, yes, you’ve guessed it, a contact form that would go to a real person.
I completed the form, but something was tugging at my memory in the background and all I could remember was spiders. So I Googled it, and sure enough, there are spider bots that crawl all over websites, scraping them and training their AI. I thought I’d resolved it before, but the fix then was quite confusing and required me to go in and change the code. I didn’t have the time to do it nor the capacity to learn the bits I didn’t know and I think I stuck a plaster (Band Aid) over it.
Now there are plugins that do it all for you, some are free, some are cheap, some are expensive. Some just stop the scraping while others keep the bots out. Yet more do both and then some. I’ll wait for JetPack to come back to me first, but then I think I may install one of the plugins.
That took a good couple of hours out of my day and meant something had to fall by the wayside. And yesterday that was the workshop work and the client edit. I managed everything else before the end of the day, but I toyed with taking the assignment work into the living room with me so I could work on it by hand.
The poet came home from work with ‘a bit of a throat’ (he’s been drinking Throat Coat for 2 days!) and didn’t feel like cooking tea. My days finish at around 7pm these days, and with the dogs vying for attention and competing with each other throughout the day, it’s rare I get everything done. So he still makes tea at the moment. (I really thought that Thursday might be the exception but, once again, things outside of my control do have a habit of interfering.) But I suggested we had a takeaway, and he jumped at the opportunity. So that’s what we had.
Today
Today, then, I want to finish the client proofread and get it sent back. I have light therapy treatment #28 first thing. I want to try and catch up on the workshop work. And I want to at least touch the client edit.
I would have liked to do some Patreon/Medium premium work this week, but that will have to wait now. I’ll find space for it next week instead.
Have a terrific weekend.
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
