Last week’s hoo-ha really knocked me back and I’m trying my hardest to catch up again. I get far too enraged by everything these days, it seems. I really am turning into that grumpy old woman. I don’t have any patience for anything.
I was determined to be productive, though, and when the poet asked me what I’d achieved at the end of the day he was impressed when I told him, to say the least. He knows me too well!
We’ve both decided to raise the bar on the 16:8 fasting thing. He’s already better at it than me as once I start grazing I never want to stop. But he was starting to have sugar in his black coffee, starting to have a white tea, and snacking after 8pm. At least he’s losing weight. I hardly ever lose anything, although I am currently at 1½lb lost after just over a week of being inspired by Leah Hope.
So he’s having black coffee only during fasting time, and I’m having water. Neat, straight, boring tap water. We’re also taking our collagen after 12 noon too, as apparently that gives us a protein spike anyway and, as we have gummies, a sugar spike too. Saying that, he ordered some collagen powder and that arrived yesterday. Three great big sacks, about 8” x 5” x ½” with what feels like hardly anything in them.
This means I don’t get my dirty cuppa first thing in the morning, and that means I now go straight into a reading hour, followed by a housework hour again, followed by a dog walking hour. I’m not doing the daily words as it isn’t being very useful for me at the moment, other than doing a brain dump when something has kept me awake at night
Yesterday, my reading hour was actually spent doing work I could do on my mobile phone, mainly on the Draft2Digital website and on Kindle Direct Publishing. I accidentally unpublished a book on KDP and immediately received a notice telling me I’d be banned from putting pre-orders up for the next year. I did just shrug my shoulders, my bad. But then I received an email from them saying they were going to waive the penalty this time if I wanted to try again and could I email them with the ASIN.
So that’s what most of my reading hour was spent doing yesterday, first chatting with a bot and trying to convince it to let me talk to a person, and then talking to a person, who removed the pre-order penalty and told me to re-submit the book. And all without me having to beg. I couldn’t help myself, I admit to being a little bit impressed… (feels forehead for slight temperature…)
I went straight into the housework hour, which had already been eaten into anyway by the bot/techie conversation. I emptied the dishwasher, fed the birds, emptied the bins, and took the regular bin out.
I decided to postpone the dog walk until I’d had something to eat and did an editing pomodoro instead. And when I’d done that I republished the next Wordsworth Short on the list, The Most Scariest Night of the Year, having already re-republished The Spirit of the Wind. I want them to re-release every weekday for 2 weeks starting on 4 May, and then I’ll look at republishing Ten Short Stories: Wordsworth Shorts 1 – 10. Once that’s out of the way, I’ll move on to the next 10.
These stories are getting new covers as well as new interiors. I do like the original covers, but I made them in Canva and then replicated some of them in Affinity. At least if I renew the covers as well then they’ll all be consistent with each other. I’m using the same artwork, I’ve just changed the covers. And I’ve standardised the byline at the top of the cover instead of being much smaller further down.
Inside, they’re getting Baggins Bottom Books changed to Baggy Bottom Books, along with the logo. They’re having the Human Authored log inserted. They have the AI training prohibited wording included. And they’re having the most up to date ‘also by’ pages so D2D doesn’t put that at the front (or the back) of the books. Amazon don’t like links to other retailers in books published direct there, and I assumed Kobo wouldn’t like it much either. So now I’m making a generic epub file as well to use on Amazon, Kobo and Google Play.
Here are the first 5 new covers.
The old ones had Wordsworth Shorts at the top and the colour of the boxes was cream. Now, the Shorts are going to have black boxes and I’ll choose a different colour for the Flash Fiction and the Collections. So they all look the same but clearly part of a different series.
I sent it off to publish, and then remembered I hadn’t changed the cover image credit on the copyright page. I’m using a standard template now and just filling in the gaps, but I’d forgotten to do that. Resolving to come up with some kind of checklist, I went in, correct the error, and republished it again.
After I’d eaten, I took the dog for his walk. He wasn’t happy at being made to wait, but we don’t want him getting into the habit of doing certain things at certain times. Work doesn’t always fall that simply and he needs to remember that he isn’t the boss…Yeah, right…
And then it was back to the editing. I cleared quite a lot, but it’s slow going. So I moved the next 2 proofreading jobs along by another week and stretched this one out for during this week. Feeling quite smug that I was still at least keeping within deadline, I then decided to enrol in a live online workshop in May.
It should have been a study along, but I’d seen somewhere that the next study along wasn’t happening. Two extra workshops had been added to the program, possibly instead of the study along. But the study along was still up there. If I couldn’t do the study along I at least wanted to do one of these extra workshops, making a living writing novels. The classes are recorded, but we get to hand in assignments and get feedback on them. So I fired off an email asking for confirmation the study along wasn’t happening and asking to enrol on the novel writing one instead.
Just in case he said yes, which I kind of expected him to anyway, I went in and added the classes to my TickTick, all 6 weeks and assignments and all. And then an email came in with another proofreading job we’ve all in production been waiting for…a rush job because the author is getting a bit impatient with us all. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, while the publisher might be one of the busiest publishers on the planet with a very big publication catalogue and lots and lots of books in production, to the author, the author’s book is the most important book of all. We’re all still well within schedule, but we know that. The author only has our word for it.
The poet came home from work, cut all four lawns, strimmed all the edges, and made us a delicious prawn salad for our tea. Mondays are meat-free in our house, but that doesn’t mean we can’t eat fish. For afters we had the last of the giant muffins I made at the weekend for comparison against my first ever mini muffins.
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