Last week I ordered a food and allergies diary in a bid to see if there’s a pattern with my skin. That arrived on Friday, and I started it yesterday morning. This isn’t a calorie counting diary, just a general, broad diary to see if there’s a link between things I eat and my symptoms. Within minutes of starting it, the puppy had started chewing it. D’uh! Serves me right for leaving it where he could reach it…
The day began at about 6:15am when the puppy wanted out. At 7am the poet was up and I was up again and feeding the dogs. For the first time the puppy waited until I told him he could eat before he went for it. Yay! We keep thinking we’re making progress, and then we take 2 steps backwards again. But we ARE making progress.
The poet was out before 7:30am, but I went back to bed with the dogs for half an hour. An hour later (!) we got up again, and this time we stayed up. I had my dirty cuppa first, and I put one of the floor mats through the washing machine. The carpet cleaner hadn’t quite cleaned it very well and it is machine washable, they all are, so I just put it through the machine. When I was dressed, I fed the birds, did the dog poo walk around the garden (clearing it up, not just observing it), and then played with the dogs for about 30 minutes. When we went back in, they were nicely tired.
Once at my desk, first job of the day was yesterday’s blog post. When I published that, I immediately started today’s. I did my weekly finances and I did a weekly backup, both jobs I should have done on Friday, as was yesterday’s blog post. This time I did at least have some big figures to put through my books as my annual car insurance is due on 5 November (easy to remember), and one of my monthly pension payments landed.
I had a quick play with book covers as I’m toying with a collection of Christmas, new year or winter stories. Whether they come out this year or whether I write new material for next year is still under consideration. But, of course, I ended up falling down a bit of a dark hole…
In the end I made new covers for all of the Wordsworth Shorts collections of 10, 25, 50 and 100. About 14 covers in all. I had the artwork and I had most of them made on Canva. But I wanted to reproduce them in Affinity as well as I could and while I was there, I thought I may as well do all of them. I also did a 5 stories for Christmas cover and ‘another’ 5 stories for Christmas. I’ll probably do ‘5 more’, and then I’ll bundle them together into 15.
Trouble is, I don’t have 15 short stories about Christmas yet, but I will do. I’ll come up with those ideas first, then I’ll check the calls for submissions. I need a calls for submissions diary system as I keep missing the deadlines. At the very worst, these calls will give me further ideas to write up, and if the stories don’t make it there, they can go in first the bookazine, and then either in a collection or as standalones, or the other way around, depending on where we are in the year when they’re all finished.
I’m one cover in the Collections collection down. I had a nice unicorn image, but it didn’t work with the cover format/orientation, and I had some nice images of books with dice or a lighthouse, but again, they didn’t work with the orientation. So I carried on looking. I opened a few up, to see if there were any similar in the artists’ own collections, but tea was on the table by then and I had to turn everything off, or I would have been working all evening.
Today, I really ought to get around to those editing jobs. Once they’re off my desk, I can concentrate on my own work again.
What a good day’s work!
I love all the scheduled playtime with the dogs. I’m sure that’s a big part of the progress.
I hope the play time is working!