Tuesday 15 September 2026: Warming up

Today’s image is another from our campsite 2 weeks ago. I’ll be using these pictures all this week, just to give an idea of why we keep going back there and why we like it so much.

We had such good intentions for Monday. The poet was still off work but needed to go and arrange a sick note at our new GP, and I had a full week of work planned, starting at 9am on Monday with my first reading hour of the week.

Well, we slept in…and the poet had to dash out straight away, once we’d moved the cars around.

First, he had to go to our old GP and get our last month of prescriptions. While he was there he said goodbye and thanked them for being the best doctor’s surgery in the world ever, and he meant it. The one thing that would have kept us in that village was the GP surgery.

I was going to go with him but he wanted to try the drive on his own. He was feeling better, but he’d call me if he needed an escort home.

On his way back he went to our new surgery, who said no problem regarding the sick note. We weren’t registered yet, but we would be by the end of the day, and by they way, it isn’t a sick note any more, it’s a fitness note. And they’d arrange one for collection that would cover him for 2 weeks.

When he got home, he was done in and ready for a rest, but he was glad he’d done it.

While he was gone, I got through some household chores. The reading hour had already left the building, but I still had time to put some washing through, wash some crocks, empty the bins, and put a new liner in the kitchen bin. I rattled off a quick blog post for yesterday too.

Then I settled down on the short story writing plan for the month. I already had 2 stories in that need submitting before the end of October, but that left 3 more weeks to fill of short story writing slots. So I surfed the calls for submissions and selected the 3 that most piqued my fancy and I filled all of my work slots to the end of October. I hung out the washing too.

I’d already reinstated Project Management for Writers: Gate 3 for throughout October when I worked on this the previous Friday. I’d already filled in the republishing slots to the end of November. And I’d already filled in the client editing jobs I had in already. All I needed to do was identify those 3 stories I most wanted to have a go at.

On the previous Friday I’d left some of the republishing jobs dangling during December too, but I wanted to try and get this chore finished by the end of November if I could while still writing a new short story a week. That would leave December to work on Words Worth Reading for a January 2027 reboot, and I have a 2-hour slot each week for the premium stories on Patreon and Medium.

Normally I would have squeezed more into the week and I would have filled the calendar to the last working day in December, which is the Friday before the Christmas week. I always take 2 weeks off at Christmas and never want any work hanging over my head. But this time I’ve left the rest of December free, for now, while I see how everything goes. And I’ve allocated 2 hours a week to one weekly job and 2 hours a month to one monthly job. Normally I’d leave those at 1 hour each, but I have to start pacing myself better.

With all of that out of the way, it was time to turn to this week’s work: the new editing job and today’s blog post. I started the blog post first, while I warmed up, then the plan was to format and printed off the editing job…

Hmm. Well, once I had a look it was clear that the author hasn’t used word-wrap, instead inserting a carriage return (ENTER) every time they reached the edge of the page, and paragraphs weren’t at all defined. Once I’d changed this to double-line spacing, I had something like 230 pages that needed a space and a delete in front of almost every single carriage return.

I could have printed it off, but that would have meant a lot of extra hand-writing work as well as trying to see through all the ink. Instead, I steadily set about doing it on screen before printing it off, and while I did that I also spotted some find-and-replaces I could do throughout before printing. It’s going to be a long job, though, and by the time I was already fed up I’d only cleared something like 25 pages. That’s about 10% of the overall page count. (Sigh.)

These corrections won’t be on the tracked changes version as that would leave far too much noise in the on screen document for the author to wade through later.

Also on the schedule was republishing Wordsworth Short #15: The Phoenix Lights. I had intended on working on that while the new edit printed. In the end, I left the editing job at just one hour for the day and turned to the republishing to finish off the day. I had to refresh my memory again, having been in a really good rhythm before breaking off a couple of weeks ago, and that took a bit of time. But once I was off, I was, well, off.

It was almost 7:30pm by the time I finished work. I’d already brought the washing in and put another wash load through, but the poet had already started to do tea too. So I closed down before finishing today’s blog post, finishing it this morning instead.

I have another book to republish today, Wordsworth Short #16, Arriverderci Roma, then I’m making new covers for the next 4. After that, I have 2 hours allocated to the editing job.

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