Friday 18 September 2026: Friday already

Okay, so we may have lost most of the first half of September to holidays and sickness, but the rest of the month sure is moving on by in a flash!

Looks like sleeping in that extra half hour is the norm this week. By yesterday we were awake on time but then we spent the next 30 minutes talking about getting up! Maybe next week we’ll manage the other half an hour and start getting up on time again.

The poet went straight into hanging washing out while I tapped out a short story idea on the tablet that came to me during the night for a call for submission that expires on 27 September.

I had the time slots already in my calendar next week for this story, but I didn’t have an idea of where to start. So I had a chat with the Cosmos and the Cosmos obliged…at something like 3am Thursday morning, which of course meant I was thrashing that idea out in my head for the next hour or so. No wonder I still struggled to get up on time.

I tried to export the idea as a docx file so I could transfer it to the computer, but I needed to upgrade the app to premium, and it wouldn’t let me. Undergoing maintenance, apparently. Instead, I copied and pasted it onto my TickTick project for this story, which I can access across all devices, and for backup I pasted it into an email to myself as well.

First job of the day after I hit my desk was to go and grab this story idea and paste it into my Scrivener short story master file. Maybe I don’t need the premium version after all, although it is a one-off lifetime payment of just £8 (apx. $11). If it’s under a tenner and if it’s a one-off lifetime payment, I don’t mind paying for it. But if their payment system doesn’t work…Not my fault. I tried.

Next, I republished the next Wordsworth Short on the list, #20 Around the Maypole. Then I ran down my entire list of publications and stripped out all of the existing Wordsworth Shorts still to republish, #21 to around 46 I think it was. I’ve decided to do all the Wordsworth Shorts to date first, adding in the collections in between every time I have 10, 25 or 50 to collate together.

Then I had a look at my Wordsworth Flash Fictions, which were originally for any story under 1,200 words. However, as some of my Wordsworth Shorts are just under 1,200 words, and as some of the Flash Fictions are just over 1,200 words, I’ve decided to republish 5 of the Flash Fictions as additional Wordsworth Shorts, bringing the total to date to 51.

This means my Flash Fiction Collection 1 – 10 will have some stories taken out and a few more added in (already written), and I’ll hit the 50 Wordsworth Shorts without writing another new story. It makes much more sense to do it this way and I just wish I’d thought it out properly the first time.

With that resolved, I turned to the next 5 covers for the republishing programme. These will be the next collection of 10, Ten Short Stories – Wordsworth Shorts 11 – 20, plus the next 4 Wordsworth Shorts, 21 – 24.

Fortunately, by the time I’d got round to these in my publishing challenge of 2022, I’d thought to include things like picture credits for the cover images and I didn’t have to go in search of those. So I made the next 4 blank Wordsworth Shorts covers, changing only the titles, then just dropped the images in. Job done.

I started today’s blog post, and then it was back to the client edit and deleting those pesky carriage returns. I started to feel a bit stiff and achey, though, and decided to finish a few minutes earlier and stretch out the kinks. I got to p. 147 and brought the total page count down to 204. I’d like to get this stage finished today, but I do have a hair appointment this afternoon, so we’ll see how it goes.

Whatever you’re up to at the weekend, I hope it’s a good one. I think we may consider taking the dog on a slightly longer walk, possibly at the end of a bit of a drive. The poet has another week on the sick, so we won’t be overdoing it, but he is climbing the walls a bit by now.

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