Today’s picture has nothing to do with today’s post, but it’s one I received back in December for free and liked, and I just hadn’t got around to using it yet. I found it when I was clearing out my downloads folder last week.
It rained on Thursday for the rest of the day, and then it rained for the rest of the night as well. It was wonderful. And we even had thunder from the time we went to bed to the time the dog was waking us up to go out. I do love to lie in bed and listen to a good storm. The problem is, it relaxes me so much I usually fall asleep and miss it all! Ah, well. At least the garden looked appreciative on Friday morning.
We did sleep in, though. Must have been all that rain making us feel relaxed! As soon as he got up the poet went straight into a Teams meeting, and then he went into another one right after. I busied myself feeding and watering the dog, playing with the dog, and keeping us supplied with dirty cups of tea and coffee.
I found a post on Facebook about why alcohol is poison and I found it so interesting, I read it out to the poet. For the first time he actually stopped what he was doing and came to sit next to me while I read it to him, it was such a good article. Usually he carries on doing whatever he’s doing but listens with half an ear, or one ear…
Once at my desk, the first thing I did was write up Friday’s blog post. I’d written most of it the day before but then got so carried away with the client editing job that by the time I’d finished that I didn’t have the energy to read the blog post through, choose a picture, schedule it to post everywhere, etc. So, once again, I was rushing to get it posted.
It’s September now, and September is always my time of new beginnings. As a start, I decided to try and get ahead with the blog posts again. I know, I’ve said this a few times and failed, but it really does need to be my last job of the day, to get it scheduled. I already allocate an hour to it, just in case, and with me doing it first thing every day, it’s pushing the day along by that hour and by the time the right hour comes around, the day’s over and my tea’s often on the table.
So, once I’d posted Friday’s, I started to schedule this week’s posts, which of course meant they needed to be written first. I kept casting around looking for my wall calendar, but it isn’t up yet and I don’t think I even have one that can go up. The one at the old house wasn’t really working and I think it went in the bin when we moved. The kind of wall calendar I like, though, is quite expensive, too expensive for just the last 4 months of the year, and I printed one off instead, an academic calendar.
The poet located my old notice board so I could have the calendar in front of me, and I coloured the calendar in. (Who needs a colour printer?) I was going to print off monthly calendars to the end of the year as well, but the notice board already had a clear punched pocket with monthly calendars for the rest of 2026, with big numbers. I found the one for August and threw the earlier ones away. (They really are just a visual aid.) Then I propped the notice board up in my line of vision so I could crack on and draft the blog posts for the coming week.
The first scheduled blog post was easy, because it was just Monday’s bank holiday post. I wrote it, chose the image, and scheduled it on Medium, Patreon and the website. I started today’s blog post. Then I moved on to the Tuesday wrap-up post for August, for which I already had the graphic.
I had to leave the wrap-up post dangling a bit, to see what I achieved during the rest of the day. Then I fast-forwarded to Wednesday’s month ahead post for September. I chose the image and made the graphics for both the Hello, September and the September wrap-up posts, then had a look at my calendar for September.
Planning for September too the best part of the rest of the day as I wanted to include short stories again from the second week. If I don’t get around to them, I won’t beat myself up as I’m still heavily involved with the republishing. But I wanted to have some story ideas in mind in case I fancied doing any brainstorming while we were off. So I researched a pile of open calls for submissions to the end of the year and allocated 4 of them to September.
This meant I also had to add them to my calls for submissions spreadsheet and to my master short story Scrivener file. I collated them to Google docs and uploaded that to my Google drive, in case I want to do any copy and pasting on the road.
I didn’t have time to write any book reviews, but I did make the graphics for the next one on the list. Then I did a backup to my portable hard drive so at least I have everything there in case I decide to do anything on my laptop.
I finalised today’s blog post, chose the image, and scheduled it everywhere. That means I scheduled 4 blog posts for this week. If I felt like it over the bank holiday weekend, I might have done a book review post for tomorrow as well, but we won’t know if I managed that until tomorrow!
Busy day!
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
Sounds like the good kind of busy, though!
It was nice!