Tuesday 5 May 2026: Good work!

I promised that today’s post would appear yesterday, but I’d forgotten that yesterday was a bank holiday, and bank holidays get their own kind of blog post. Sorry about that, but here we are now, eh?

Last Tuesday was a good day as far as work was concerned. Got up on time. Fed the dog. Had my dirty cuppa. Enjoyed a reading hour, during which I actually did online reading rather than book reading. Hung a wash load up. Put a wash load away. Put another wash load through. Emptied the dishwasher. Fed the birds. Made us both more drinks, and our midday breakfast.

The poet was at home, so he emptied the kitchen bins, brought the wheelie bins back in, took the dog for a walk, made a tuna pasta bake for tea, made our afternoon meal. And he had Teams meetings and shifted a load of work throughout the day as well.

Him taking the dog for a walk meant I could have another whole hour at the proofreading rather than 2 broken hours. I did a light edit on 2 very short documents the client had sent through to be added to the book in general, and I sent those back to her. Then I worked solidly throughout the day on the pdf, mildly impressed with how clean the book actually was, even if I do say so myself!

I think I got about halfway through the book, which is good for a rush job. I didn’t print it off and proofread it, which is unusual for me, because it was quicker to just read it on screen and mark up the pdf. We don’t change the pdfs, but we do mark them up and the designer makes the changes. If there’s a very long or major addition, I’ll type it up as a Word document so the designer can just drop it in. But in general the designer makes the changes.

Two other little jobs were an advance viewing of the live class I’m attending next week and yesterday’s bank holiday blog post.

I finished work on Tuesday bang on time.

Wednesday was more of the same. Virtually identical to Tuesday, in fact. Other than it was me who took the dog for a walk because the poet had to go out to work. I finished the proofreading job and sent that back to the client, and I watched the last of the preview workshops for the one starting today, Make a Living Writing a Novel.

Thursday morning was a lot the same again. I put a washload through, hung a washload out, put a washload away, then hung out the washload I’d put through in the morning. I fed the birds and the dog. I emptied the dishwasher.

I spent time on the last couple of blog posts. The April wrap-up was first, and I updated the project spreadsheet so I had the exact number of words I’d written in April, knowing I didn’t have much to add on Thursday. I did my planning for May and transferred that to the Hello, May blog post, and then I was able to include a final word-count figure for April, as I wrote them both in April. I started today’s in April too, but I’ll count these words in May.

Then it was back to the proofreading, and this time I had three plate sections to proof the captions for. I couldn’t get Foxit to mark up these, for some reason, but I still could on the other documents I sent in the days before. I don’t know why that is. Instead, I had to use the pencil function and try and do long-hand marking up with my mouse. At least I could explain in the dialogue boxes that popped up.

But I did it and sent it off, and that concluded the client work for last week. I asked her which one she’d prefer me to do next, but I won’t be able to start that until next week.

When the poet got home, he made a start on tea (stew and dumplings) then we went out on an errand. By the time we got home, tea was ready.

Friday was a nice day. I got a lot done, in a relaxed fashion, and I finished early. The poet was working from home, it was our wedding anniversary, and it was the start of a long weekend. Those are the best kind of Fridays.

I got up bang on time and went straight into my reading hour with a dirty cuppa. The reading this time was newspaper articles.

For my house & garden hour I put a washload through, fed the dog, kept us all supplied with drinks, fed the birds, emptied the dishwasher, made a good start on the week’s shopping list, hung a wash load out, and updated the family organiser calendar for the next couple of weeks.

Then it was straight into making new covers for the next batch of republications, 6 in all. Five short stories and a collection. I made the covers for all 5 short stories and the collection and I made the covers for the next 3 collections as well. I hope my future self appreciates that.

I’d allocated myself 2 separate pomodoro blocks for this task, separated by things like breakfast and walking the dog. But as I’d almost done by the time we were ready for breakfast, I carried on working until it was finished. This released the best part of an hour later in the day.

Right after breakfast, we took the dog for a walk. The poet was between Teams calls and had been busy for much of the day, so I think he was glad of the break. It was a glorious day, warmer than of late, and apparently the last of the sunny days until this week.

I don’t mind that at all. We’re starting to need the rain again, despite it hardly stopping between October last year and March this year. I’m not a huge fan of the sunshine and I do like the rain. But the grass everywhere is starting to look parched, so I thought we were about due for a drop of rain.

When we got back I republished the next short story in the list, Wordsworth Short 6, Careful What You Wish For. I uploaded it to Draft2Digital, grabbed a generic epub file without all the D2D links in, uploaded that to Kobo, Google Play and Kindle Direct Publishing, then went and added the linked end matter so I could publish it on D2D as well.

Next job was the weekly backup, and then I created my accounting sheets for the new financial year, updating it to 1 May.

Final job of the day was finishing today’s blog post. I wrote it, chose the image, and scheduled it everywhere I can schedule it, and that was me done for the week and for the weekend, almost 2 hours early. Yay! Result.

When he finished his own work, the poet had some play time in the garden with the dog, and then he mowed all the lawns. He would have done it at the weekend, but I’d seen the forecast for 80% chance of rain on Saturday and 90% chance of rain on Sunday, and I hadn’t even started my rain dance yet! And just in case, he decided to get the lawns out of the way in case it did rain.

We didn’t have any plans in particular for the weekend. We decided to have Chinese for tea on Friday, and we always have enough for 2 nights, so that was Saturday covered as well. One of us had the shopping to do. And we were overdue a visit to the mother-in-law.

It was bank holiday Monday yesterday, and we took the day off. Find out what we got up to at the weekend tomorrow!

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