Monday 2 November 2026: Tidying up

I’m still tidying everything up admin-wise, but it is taking a long time. I keep thinking I’ve finally reached the bottom of my Facebook writing page posts, but then I hit refresh and there are another load. I’m having to delete stuff one by one and then keep refreshing to make sure I definitely got rid of the last one.

The things that are hanging around are those posted by Buffer a few years ago. I can delete them one by one, from the actual page, but they’re not showing up in the activity log anywhere. Then there are likes and other reactions I keep deleting but when I refresh, there they still are and when I click view, there they definitely still are and I can’t get rid of them.

I’d already decided that I’d be winding down my Facebook page before all the recent furore. Meta threatening to scrape everything belonging to anyone with a business page just gave me the kick up the bum I needed. But every day there’s another claim that Meta is holding off applying the new terms following another new court case.

They may just suck a lemon and never do it, then again they’re proving they can’t be trusted and can change their mind on the turn of a sixpence. Either way, I do believe it’s a sign of things to come.

I’m deleting the historic stuff too because I don’t want to leave anything dangling. I’ve done a few searches on my own name recently and the search is throwing stuff up I thought was long gone. I’m going through and definitely deleting it all now, but I’d rather just do what I can now than wait until something else is thrown up further down the line.

I’m generally moving stuff back to the blog or into the newsletter or onto Patreon, and I’m sharing it on BlueSky. And that’s it. I never wanted to join Facebook in the beginning, but that’s where the gig list gang went on the demise of MySpace. We had a really fun guestbook on the gig list back then too, but FB replaced that for a lot of people.

Now I have nothing to do with the gig list, beyond a friend managing it with a colleague, and FB has never been great for me as a writer. Great water cooler, yes. Rubbish marketing tool as I refuse to pay for ads, and I’m glad I never did now, seeing what’s going on with ads there now as well.

I did a lot of planning last week, giving myself until the end of December 2027 to get everything I possibly can up and for sale. The republishing will finish around the March/April mark and everything beyond then will be brand-new. I’ll have two 5-book series going live from June through to October. The remaining three project management books will start to go up from July. And throughout the year I’ll be releasing brand-new short stories and brand-new short story collections.

With everything going on I was flailing around a bit, wondering what to do next for the best and thinking there really wasn’t much point if Big Tech was just going to come along and steal it all. But now, with a plan, with a purpose, I’m starting to get fired up again.

I have a lot of work ahead and, hopefully, I’ll be able to ‘retire’ when the poet retires, so we can go off in the van on a whim and not have to worry about anything. I’ll still be doing the editing as and when it comes in, and I’ll still take a note pad or the laptop everywhere we go for when inspiration strikes. But for now, I’m stacking up that passive income.

October wrap and November plan will be up in the next few days, and book reviews should be back by next Monday, if I get my act together there as well. Oh yes, and I might be quietly joining in with the new Novel November, just to give me some accountability to motivate me.