Thursday 7 August 2025: This week!

Well, it’s Thursday already, and I’m only just catching up on this week. At least it is this week, though, and not last week still.

The weekend

Monkey Dust had a private function on Friday evening. They were doing a wedding for an extended family member of the drummer and his wife. The happy couple were lovely enough to invite us all, and it was a really nice evening with the dance floor packed from start to finish, which is unusual at a wedding.

This meant we had a late start on Saturday. I was already really tired from pulling an all-nighter on Thursday, so we didn’t have very much planned. We went to a home store to get a new set of bathroom towels, a shallow 12-hole bun tin, and a deep 4-hole Yorkshire pudding tin. We didn’t get the Yorkshire pudding tin, but we did get a new tray bake baking tray.

On Sunday we did a bit in the garden, a very little bit, although the poet did pick up a massive bucketful of windfall apples. We went to see his mum. And when we got back we did some baking. I made some bakewell slices and he made some jam tarts and our tea. He made 12 assorted tarts, and 4 of them had jam in that he’d made last year.

Monday

We slept in a bit on Monday. I was *still* tired, but my first job of the week, after my dirty cuppa, was this week’s diary. I published another short story, which will be out on Monday. And I shared Monday’s publication news on Instagram and on Facebook.

He received a message that his company car’s MOT was out of date, so he had to book that in quickly. The best he could get was an 8:30am slot on Tuesday morning, which was very good apart from the fact that my car was due in at 10:30am and I’d arranged it around him being able to take me and come back, if necessary. Now I had to follow him, in case they decided to keep it in, but I may also have had to leave him and the car there if they did it while he waited but took longer than the designated hour.

After my daily competitions, I did my daily flylady hour after our midday breakfast. It was the conservatory and the kitchen on Monday and while I cleaned down all the surfaces and windows, the poet followed me round, first with the vacuum cleaner and then with the mop.

The author I never heard back from in the spring after doing a hard copy edit of his book suddenly got in touch to say he’d revised the entire book and he’d be sending it again…which meant I’d have to print it off again and go back to the beginning. And that means I’ll be doing that job twice. I let it percolate for a bit before contacting the actual client, to see what she’d like me to do. I suspect they’ll pass on my extra fee to the author.

Funnily enough, the only other job I had to do on Monday was for the same client but a different book. So while I stewed a bit, I cracked on with that. And I started today’s blog post.

Tuesday

We had to get up early on Tuesday so we could take the poet’s car for its MOT. I had to follow in case they decided to keep it, but also in case I had to just go off for my own MOT 2 hours later. Once we were up, though, we decided it was silly for us to take 2 cars into town to sit in and wait when there was a perfectly good waiting room at the MOT centre and when I had to be back for my own. So he took his car, and I took mine.

First, though, I had my dirty cuppa, fed and watered the birds, put a washload through and hung it up (not out, as we were having storms), emptied the dishwasher, and did my daily flylady in the living room and hallway.

His company car failed its MOT and had to have 4 new boots (complete set of tyres) and 2 new squirty things at the front. My car had to have the air-con re-gassed, but it passed its MOT. Yay my car! The band wagon failed its MOT 2 weeks ago, though, on brakes. So that doesn’t bode well for when the campervan goes in on Thursday for its MOT, with everything coming in threes. BUT…both of our cars are legal again (and so is the band wagon, actually), and mine has air-con again.

We got back in time for our midday breakfast and I did my daily competitions before brainstorming a short story for 12 Stories in 12 Months. Although I’m a bit cautious with continuing with this as it’s been discovered that some people are feeding our stories through AI, (a) to see if it was written by a human, and (b) to write feedback.

Well, I don’t want my stories being fed through AI. I thought they had anti-scraping, but even if they do, anyone who is logged in can still copy & paste and do with it what they wish. So either I’ll stop doing it all together, or I’ll delete my stories after they’ve been up there for 3 months. There are more than 300 members of this challenge, plus former members who can still sign in.

In the end, I spent an hour going through and removing my stories entirely from the first and second years. For the third and current year, I did indeed go back and delete any story older than 3 months, but I didn’t remove it entirely. Instead I edited it to simply read that I’d deleted it as I didn’t want my stories feeding through AI, and thanking everyone for their comments.

As I removed each story, I copied and pasted it into a text file within Scrivener. As I edited this year’s stories, I did the same, so I have a full and complete audit trail of the first time the story appeared anywhere. This meant I could now create a program of story-writing inside Scrivener that didn’t need me to scrabble in several places for a new story idea. Every story on 12 stories in 12 months needs reading through, revising, rewriting if necessary, and proofreading before I do anything with it.

First stop after a story has appeared on 12 stories in 12 months is to see if it will fit an upcoming call for submissions. I generally do this now before I start to write a story for them too, so that I have a potential market in mind for the long haul. This often gives me ideas for titles or themes. But in the old days, I didn’t do this.

If there isn’t a suitable market for the story, then I top and tail it to suit Words Worth Reading, and then it goes into my general publishing machine. Bookazine ⟶ Standalone ⟶ Collection(s).

Tuesday’s blog post didn’t auto-post for some reason, even though the date and the time were correct. I had to go in and manually post it. I’ll have to keep an eye on that in future.

After brainstorming, it was back to the client edit, which I did for the rest of the day.

Wednesday

Tuesday morning had been a very early start. Despite getting up with the poet and then not going with him to the garage, I didn’t go back to bed, which is very good for me. Nevertheless, it meant for a long day. Or longer than I’m used to. As a result, I struggled to get out of bed on Wednesday and after the poet had gone off on a trip to the midlands, I turned my alarm off and went back to sleep.

I only lost the first hour of the day, which I hoped to catch up on throughout the day. It was my flylady hour and on Wednesdays that was still the very easy dining room. I had my dirty cuppa, got dressed, and fed and watered the birds. I sifted through the dirty washing, but there wasn’t enough of any colour to justify a load. So I deferred that for a day at least.

When I got to my desk, the next job, after flylady hour, was to outline this month’s 12 stories in 12 months. And once I’d done that, I did some more general short story work. Over my midday breakfast, I carried on with this, looking for markets for some of the stories. I did the daily competitions too, which didn’t take very long. And then it was back to the short story market work…

That was going along swimmingly right up until I broke for my dinner break. I was just finishing this, and on with one of those lovely bakewell slices I made at the weekend, when suddenly something terrible happened. The tooth I’m due to have taken out in September cracked and stabbed me in the roof of my mouth. So I had to call the dentist then to see when they could fit me in for an emergency extraction.

My dentist isn’t there this week, he’s having a week off (how very dare he?!). But the dentist who looked after me before when I needed an emergency extraction is doing it again. Today. At 12:45pm. And she’ll be doing it into her dinner break as well. I was such a blubbering wreck the first time I saw her, it’s very good of her to do it again. At least I’m a bit braver now, thanks to the confidence this dentist has given me in him and his team.

But… 😩

So it was very briefly back on with the short story market work, just while I tied things up. And then it was back on to the client edit.

Today, then, the poet is going to pick up the van and take it to its MOT. If it’s coming back again today, he’ll take it back and then take me to the dentist. If it has to stay in for work, I have to go and collect the poet so he can take me to the dentist and bring me home.

We’ll see how it all goes.