Wednesday 27 May 2026: Thunder!

The weather at the weekend was awful. Intolerable. Even the poet, who’s a bit of a sun-worshipper, said it was unbearable. But…we had lots of warning and we knew it was coming. Thank goodness we were able to prepare.

We didn’t do a lot on Bank Holiday Monday because of the heat. There was no air and the fans were only circulating warm air. By Tuesday, the dog was familiar with the fans and not as scared, although he was still wary of the big industrial one in the hallway. Also on Tuesday, the temperature was a little lower, less intense, and it didn’t last for hours. There was a bit of a breeze, and we knew that relief was coming. Or we’d been told it was coming.

Thunderstorms were due to hit South Yorkshire at about 2pm and carry on until about 10pm, with the worst of it due between 4pm and 6pm – just as the poet was supposed to be heading out for band practice. In between work meetings, he prepped tea in advance while it was still unbearably hot. We were having a lasagne and he had to boil the sheets and fry the meat and veg. Just as he assembled the lasagne ready to go into the oven for an early tea, the sky started to cloud over ever so slightly.

I didn’t do much housework in the morning. I didn’t do much of anything as it was still very hot. I fed and watered the birds and I had a play with the dog and the watering can with the spray rose attached. The trouble was, once he was wet through, he decided to have zoomies around the garden and it was definitely too hot for that. So I took him back in again.

The poet was working on his laptop in the living room, as that’s where both the tower fans were, and I went to get mine too. Fortunately, last Friday, even though I was rushing to close down for the long weekend, I did do a backup to the portable hard drive. So I had both the latest blog post Scrivener file and the latest WMG workshops assignment Scrivener file to hand.

With eyes and nose streaming (I caught the poet’s man flu, remember) I worked my way through yesterday’s blog post first, chose the image, and posted it. Next, I watched this week’s videos for the making a living from writing workshop. I got cracking on today’s blog post, worked on the assignment for the workshop, and made a big decision.

Once I’ve cleared the currently outstanding client editing and proofreading jobs I’m not going to actively go in search of work, unless it’s as a sort of beta reader. And I may not actively pursue that. I want to concentrate on my own writing and get it all published. Some short stories will be written for anthologies, but otherwise, I’ll publish everything myself.

With Draft2Digital now charging a fee, I think they’ve had their moment. Or they have with me at least. I can publish paperback and hardback books via Amazon and Lulu, it’s just a pity Lulu is so expensive for print on demand. And I can publish ebooks wherever I want. Yes, D2D may send my books out to almost a hundred retailers. But the truth is, I only actually sell to two or three: Amazon, Apple and Kobo, plus the lending libraries.

Well, I can reach the lending libraries via Kobo now, if I go direct with them. I already publish direct with Google Play. I’m publishing direct to Amazon now, again. And I already have my Apple account. I can go direct to Nook as well if I want to, and if they still have the number of books restricted to 100, I’ll just unpublish the short stories when the time comes. They’ll all be appearing in the collections and the bookazine anyway.

I already have a Gumroad store and I’ll be looking into a Shopify store and maybe BookFunnel. I’ll also add direct links to the books, either on Gumroad if I can, or on here if I can’t. The premium plugins are already eyeing my site here so I predict it won’t be long before I can legitimately monetise it properly.

I have until the end of October to get all of this up and running. So once I’ve shifted the current workload and after we’ve successfully moved house and settled in, that’s what I’ll be concentrating on. But already my hive mind is planning ahead, deciding which to do first, and where to send the short stories. I know we can manage financially until then as we’ve been having a bit of a dummy run in the lead up to the move.

If I’m only writing and not editing or proofreading, there will be less need for me to have a full blown office with a desktop computer. And that frees up the room allocated as my office for something else, like a sitting room, or a garden room, or a reading room. We won’t be using it as a spare bedroom as the campervan will be parked alongside the house and there’s a perfectly adequate spare bedroom in there. We may be using it while we renovate the house!

At about 2:45pm, a call came in cancelling the band practice, which meant the poet could have waited until it got cooler to prepare tea. It also meant we could eat our regular meals at their regular times. And he didn’t have to head out during a potential flash flood.

The sky turned very dark at about 3:30pm, thunder started to rumble overhead, the internet became unstable, and by 3:50pm the rain was coming down in stair rods. I took the opportunity to take the dog into the garden for a few minutes as it had been far too hot for him to run around. However, the rain was very hurty and the sky was very shouty. He didn’t like it very much and he came running in twice.

We watched the rain for the next half an hour, after which the thunder continued to rumble as it moved away from us. It was cooler at least, but only marginally. Next time I checked, at about 4:30pm, the temperature was down to a far more manageable 18℃ (64℉)!

I finished the assignment and sent it off, and I finished today’s blog post and scheduled it to post.

Today it needs to be cooler, much cooler. I have 3 jobs to do, 2 of which will be easier on the desktop, the other of which is very difficult on the laptop. I’m republishing the short stories again, from Wordsworth Short #7 onwards, and I have that side-by-side proofreading job to get on with.