I forgot to mention on Friday, that while we were re-arranging the office furniture around the new internet router, I was doing a lot of crawling around on my knees. The only thing I could think at the time was that my knees were clearly completely shot. I was in agony. Then I started to get all maudlin about how my knees have gone really early…and then I remembered my little tumble earlier in the week.
Yes, both of my knees are bruised and on Friday I was still aching. But it was getting better and I’m hoping that by the time today’s post goes live they’ll feel loads better.
I didn’t get up early on Friday. I was still shattered from all the early mornings and rude awakenings from earlier in the week. We didn’t have to get up for anyone or anything and I, for one, turned my alarm off. When we did eventually surface, I did feel refreshed.
I kept on admiring the garden, it was so bright and light and looking so much bigger. So for my half-hour of activity, I did an inspection walk. As the poet was working at home, he accompanied me.
It was only a short stroll, but we pretty much know now what still needs doing and what we’re prepared to do over the next couple of years. The poet retires in just under 2½ years, and he may go earlier if we can afford it. He gets his state pension then (we have to wait another 3 years for mine) and we may not be living here long after then. So we might just tidy it up, keep on top of the maintenance, and maybe plant just annuals. At the very least, we still want to dog-proof it.
At dinnertime, we popped out to the butcher’s to get our meat for next week. We’d done the rest of the shopping on Thursday evening, before grand-doggy #1 got here on Friday. When we got back, I faffed a lot, and he connected both televisions to the internet. I’m connected to the internet by ethernet cable, so I’m a very happy bunny. Everything else connects by wi-fi.
In between, I did the editing job.
We spent Saturday in the garden, tidying up after the great clearance of last week. There’s still a lot that needs doing. We have to fence off the end of the garden and one side, plus a little gap behind where the greenhouse used to be.
On Sunday we went out to the seaside. We took the dog for a good run and played ball with him. We got there in time to have our picnic breakfast, but our picnic dinner came back with us and we had that when we got home.
Yesterday, I prepared the Scrivener file and started the final book for the great novella challenge.
The internet was being very slow, but I wondered if it had something to do with the Great Cloud Outage. I wasn’t affected at all by the outage, as I use apps very rarely. We control the browsers and who can stalk track us but *they* control the apps, so I steer clear of as many of them as I can. Also, I don’t rely on Amazon quite as much as others do, so that wasn’t an issue for me either.
Most things on my phone are browser short cuts. Facebook in particular really, really doesn’t like that.
Speaking of Amazon, it seems that Draft2Digital is blocking a lot of ebooks being published to Kindle now. All of my books still have the option in the control panel, but a lot of people are saying they don’t get that option now. D2D have told some that Kindle publishing is by invitation only, and only if books are long enough or of a sufficient quality…though how they can tell the quality of an ebook is anyone’s guess. D2D have told others that new accounts can’t publish to Kindle.
Kindle is the last one still to publish my latest book, out yesterday, apart from Hoopla, which already takes months. I don’t know if that’s to do with the outage yesterday or if they’re chucking it back at D2D (or D2D aren’t even passing it on).
It really doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to bother some. D2D did this before with Kindle, and they already ceased any agreements with Google Play Books a long time ago and never got back together with them. We can still use our epub files to upload to KDP (IF WE WANT TO), just like we do for Google Play Books. Some experts even say to do that with Kobo anyway. And even if D2D didn’t give me a universal file, Scrivener do and I also have Vellum. But Vellum is Mac only. I think the Windows equivalent is Atticus, or something like that.
I’m keeping a close eye on things and already planning for if D2D suddenly pull the plug, on either me or the process. I’m also looking around for another bookstore shop front. I already have Gumroad, but I don’t know how folk rate that, and I’m looking at Shopify. Bookfunnel may also do something. Who knows, I may yet go back to Lulu…
You know me, I hate to leave all my eggs in one basket and am always on the lookout for alternatives, just in case.
The garden sounds lovely.
Always good to have options, isn’t it? And so many platforms show up and then vanish. it’s exhausting.
Sounds like you had a good weekend, and I hope this is a good week.
The garden looks HUGE! It could be lovely, it needs a lot of work.
And thank you!