Friday 18 September 2026: Busier than it looks

Friday was more busy than it looks when I go down and tick things off, but the truth is, I worked on a few large jobs rather than a lot of little jobs.

I was halfway republishing Ten Short Stories: Wordsworth Shorts 11 – 20. I’d done the cover, I’d updated the interior, and I’d compiled all ten stories for this volume inside its own folder in the master short story Scrivener file. The cover was done earlier in the week during a covers session, and the stories were all copied from the Wordsworth Shorts folder into the Wordsworth Collections folder.

I tell you, finding that ‘copy to…’ function in Scrivener has been a Godsend. Before I noticed it, I’d do straight duplicates of the files, move them to the new folder, and rename them. But now I can just right-click one or ten or a hundred and select ‘copy to…’ from the drop down menu, and there they are, copied. The poet, being a lean coach, asked if I then only had to make any changes to the original and they’d all filter down. I don’t think I can do that, or if I can I haven’t spotted it yet. But I’m not sure I’d want to as that would break the audit trail.

But all of that had taken up the hour I’d allocated. I still had to transfer the copyright information and picture credits over and give the stories another quick proofread. So I had to allocate another hour and move something along. That something was the 2-hour slot for the premium material on Patreon and Medium.

By the end of the new hour, I’d finished all of the admin and got it republished everywhere, on Draft2Digital, Google Play Books, Kobo, KDP, and on Gumroad. And then it was time to go out and get my hair cut. The poet came along for the ride and by the time we got back the day was over, practically, and I didn’t feel like going back to work. So I didn’t.

On Saturday, the poet stayed home while I did the weekly shop. And on Sunday we went for the short walk up to one of our local pubs for a Sunday dinner. The walk was lovely, gentle, scenic – as we walked across the meadow and through the woods alongside the playing fields. There were several rugby games being played on the playing fields and we watched those for a bit as we walked through the woods coming back. But we won’t be going back to the pub for a Sunday dinner.

The food was nice enough, but the place wasn’t very clean and looked a bit scruffy, and they forgot to bring out the dog’s dinner we’d booked and paid for, chicken breast with gravy. When it finally arrived, it was the tiniest breast of chicken cut into small chunks and there wasn’t any gravy. If it has been nicer, we were going to ask about booking for Christmas dinner as we don’t really have room for everyone to come to ours this year. It would be nice to be invited to one of theirs for a change, but we’re not holding our breath. If we can get in somewhere, we will. But it won’t be there.

The poet has another week left on his sick/fitness note so he’ll be building up his stamina, bit by bit, and we’ll be keeping an eye on things. His antibiotics finished last Wednesday and he’s been a bit apprehensive since then, but so far, touch wood, he’s been fine.

Today I have a short story outline to flesh out, two short stories to republish, and that reformatting to finish on the client edit.

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