Tuesday 18 August 2026: Covers work

After a lot of planning work on Friday, I was ready to go yesterday morning. And despite a bit of a disturbed night, I was up relatively on time going straight into my reading hour over my first dirty cuppa of the day.

But the poet had suffered a bit of a relapse during the night and he had things to cancel this week. He didn’t fancy being stranded in Ireland while not feeling well, and certainly not cooped up on an aeroplane for a few hours. So he cancelled his trip and called the doctor.

The doc wasn’t available to speak to him so the receptionist arranged for a call back and, actually, the doc wasn’t too shabby coming back to him. We had to be at the surgery before 12:30pm for a slightly stronger prescription. So my housework hour for Monday and my first work hour of the day were spent taking him there and back.

When we got back, it was time for our midday breakfast, although the poet hasn’t been eating a great deal. He is a lot better, he just had a bit of a pain relapse and thought perhaps he could do with a few more days of antibiotics.

My midday breakfast is only 30 minutes now, instead of the original hour, so not long after 12:30pm I was at my desk and writing up yesterday’s blog post. Once that was done, and I’d illustrated it and shared it everywhere, I started today’s.

The lost work hour meant I didn’t start a new short story, but it was only a brainstorm so I thought I’d be able to fit it in later in the day. I also thought I might be able to do something with the one I brainstormed last week or the week before but then didn’t finish as the proofreading took priority.

But when I went back to the short story brief, it didn’t excite me at all and I decided to leave this particular one. I don’t have one scheduled for next week, so I might work on that one I started earlier and just write it. It’s too late for the call for submissions, but I can do something with it anyway,

I fired an email off to the editing client with a few work questions then moved on to the next task on the list: create new covers for next 6 books.

Well, I thought this would be a nice quick job, until I saw that the next 5 books already had new covers made. There they all were, in my folder as jpgs or pngs. But when I opened the Affinity covers file, there they weren’t! I searched all over the place for a later Affinity file that had the extra covers in, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. So then I had to go and collect the images again, and I couldn’t find half of those either.

Instead of 2 hours on this I spent 4, but by the end of the day I’d got all the covers in the Affinity file for Wordsworth Shorts 1 to 12 and the first 4 Wordsworth Shorts collections. And all the images. And I made sure I saved them all properly. Unnecessary work, but as I closed the final file down I had a vague recollection that I’d accidentally closed without saving last time I worked on these, back in May. Just in case it happened again, I very quickly did a backup to the portable hard drive.

I didn’t hear from the editing client, and at 6:30pm I called it a day. Today I’ll be republishing the first 3 books for which I made the covers.

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