Friday 31 July 2026: Wishing for rain

And just like that, it’s the end of July…

We nearly forgot to take the dog for his walk on Wednesday, we’d been so busy with the window fitters and tidying up and everything. It was, in fact, the dog who reminded us. Loudly. Neither of us could work out what he was trying to say, until the poet remembered one important thing we hadn’t done. We’d already had tea by this time and had settled down to watch Granite Harbour. But we paused it and took the dog around a different part of the meadow, where we hoped he wouldn’t be so distracted by the rabbits in our regular meadow.

I didn’t take my phone so didn’t track the mileage, but it is longer than the regular meadow walk and was, in fact, a heath we walked around. We’re so lucky to have meadows and heaths and public footpaths that take us through the countryside right on our doorstep.

We managed to have a bit of a lie in on Thursday morning as no one was coming to the house who needed letting in. We were disappointed to see, though, that the windows were still awaiting collection. The poet went off to work and I set about the housework. I put a washload through, fed the garden birds (they’ve started to visit the bird table), filled the bath and the trays with water so they could have a drink or a bathe, and fed the dogs. And when it was ready, I hung the washing out, praying for rain as I did so.

The rain didn’t come.

At my desk I picked up a few calls for submissions and shared a couple of them on the two Facebook groups I’m a member of and on Bluesky. I followed a couple more organisations on Bluesky who have calls for submissions throughout the year. I won’t share a call for submissions if (a) they don’t pay, (b) they charge a reading/entry fee, of (c) they grab all your rights. But sometimes that information isn’t very easy to locate and it can take time, so that took up a chunk of my morning.

I finalised yesterday’s blog post, uploaded the image, and shared the story everywhere.

I updated my submissions calendar with the story I submitted the day before. I’d already updated the tracker on Duotrope right after I sent it.

I started today’s blog post.

And I went and brought our wheelie bin in.

After my midday brunch, I had a look at the schedule for the coming week and moved a couple of things along I hadn’t done earlier this week due to people being here. I reduced my midday brunch and my afternoon tea hours to just 30 minutes each, which gave me a whole extra hour a day to work with. I made an executive decision to cancel one of the three short stories I was going to write this week, as there’s another call for submissions there later in the year. And I went through the next two months adding in the republishing jobs I want to do.

The plan was originally to blitz a load of Wordsworth Shorts in one week, but realistically, I think I may burn out if that’s all I’m doing all day for five days. Plus, there’s no pressing deadline to do this, and because of that I can see me moving those all along again. Instead, I have my writing hour straight after my reading hour every day, apart from Tuesdays when I have a writing two hours for the first draft. For the next two or three hours I’m working on the republishing, and I’m saving a two-hour slot every day in case I have client work still pending (one hour on Fridays), although I’ll still be blitzing that over the next two weeks, as planned and promised.

This means once I’ve caught up on the client work, I’ll have my dirty cuppa hour, my writing hour (or two), my republishing two or three hours, and my client two hours, or one hour on a Friday. The rest of the day is for admin work, i.e. blog posts, weekly backups, weekly finances, monthly finances, tax returns, etc. We mustn’t forget the admin work.

That gives me six hours of writing every week, fourteen hours on the republishing work, and nine hours of client work. Every week. If I can’t manage that, then I need to give up and call it a day.

It’s taken me a few runs at this, to sort out my working week, and I’ve done it amid upheaval on the home front at the same time. When there isn’t any client work, and when I’ve caught up on the republishing – if it works this time – then I’ll have another look at my working week to see where I can realistically fit in more writing work and any self-publishing or marketing. I absolutely cannot assign any more time on a daily basis to the home front. I’m already doing enough of that.

I was starving hungry by this time, and it was 3pm, but my new afternoon tea break is at 3:30pm, so I satisfied myself with a biscuit and a trigger (hopefully) cup of coffee. I had a short, 1,000-word story to write, but that got moved to today as I ran out of time. But at least the plan is there and, hopefully, solid moving forward.

And still the rain didn’t come.

As the new garden is happening next week, I think we may nip out over the weekend to buy a sprinkler for the new grass. We don’t have a hosepipe ban here yet and we have rain forecast for Monday evening onwards [does extra hard rain dance!]. There’s no point, though, in laying new turf if it’s just going to die of thirst. We still haven’t decided what kind of a garden we’re having, be it productive, wildlife-friendly, fragrant, cottage or whatever, but we do know we want a lawn front and back.

We also need a new blind in the bathroom as the old café curtains, while pretty, are a bit too lacy for me, and a bit too grubby. Yes, they’ll wash, but they’re not ours and the café curtain pole is rusted all the way through. If we’re going to be drilling around the new windows, we’ll do it on the ceiling of the window recess where we’re having a blind anyway and not in the middle of the actual frames. For now we’re going to get a cheap and cheerful one as we don’t know yet if the tiles in the bathroom are tiled over tiles.

Once the bathroom is done, we’ll measure the window again and get one made to measure. I’ve seen a really nice William Morris one that has pale pinks, greens, golds, and peaches against a natural background. It’s mostly pale green, to match the rest of the house, but the other colours will give us the accents for the towels, so the mood and colour changes every time we change the towels.

I doubt we’ll be doing much else this weekend, though, other than visiting the poet’s mum and doing the weekly shopping.

Whatever you’re up to, have a good one!

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