More wittering…

It’s that time of the week and here I am, back like a bad smell.

At the moment, I feel as if my blog is officially Not Funny anymore. And at the same time, not poignant either. I hope I’ll get back in the swing of making it interesting soon. In the meantime, talking of bad smells …

At the market today I couldn’t help picking up a cheesy bargain. A massive Epoisse cheese was going for a song from the catering left overs man and I bought one. I spent an hour cutting it into 25g portions and freezing it. It’s probably not something I should be eating large amounts of after two months of D&V … or at least D. Hence freezing the lions share for sunnier times. I was very pleased with it though.

It also smells. A lot. It’s not as bad as Tomme De Bethune—I believe that smells so rank that shoppers in France are banned from using public transport if they have a portion about their person—but it’s not far off.

Cheese frozen I played with my new delivery. Furniture polish. Yeh try not to get excited people. But some of Mum’s furniture hasn’t been touched much for the last few years and some of ours is a bit beaten up after years of being looked after by me … So I bought some antique wax, her recommended formula, to buff it up. I glued the leg back onto a cake stand thingy I liberated from Mum’s and fixed the barometer.

Sort of …

OK so it’s hopelessly inaccurate but that might be the result of my brother’s and my efforts to move it about. Despite the instructions on the back about transporting it, he didn’t notice them, and I, too failed to notice them until about 3 weeks after I’d received it.

Having laid it carefully flat to take it the three hours from Mum’s place to the home near my brother that she was going into, and then having done the same thing to bring it back down to my house, it transpires on reading said instructions that this is not the right thing to do. Some of the mercury has gone awol. At least I assume it has. When we came to unload it he was a bit concerned when I explained what the silver droplets were on the back seat. I did manage to shepherd most of them into a little plastic pot so I’m rather hoping it won’t cause the untimely death of either of us. It’s sitting on the mantlepiece waiting for me to work out how I tip it back into the barometer’s tube safely.

That said, I may just need to wrap the string from one of the weights round the pulley a couple of times to even them up a bit. And what with today going from bright sun to thunder and hail it’s difficult to work out what the reading should actually be. Very Stormy, where it’s sitting, might be about right.

Also this week, I’ve been trying macro photography. Here are two shots of flowers I took on the way back from the vet’s in a rare moment of sunshine.

They really looked that vivid although the purple of the thistle was a bluer one than that.

Writing stuff

This week, I have mostly been … productive.

Ooo get me.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a seat in a teaching session about how to get the best for your books out of Google Play. It cost me the princely sum of £75 or thereabouts and has been well worth the money. I couldn’t attend all of it so I did the first hour and have been working my way through the video replay. I’m three hours in and there is still more, plus a couple of supplemental videos so it’s excellent value. There were definitely some scales-from-the-eyes moments. I’m excited about some of these hints and tips and I’m half way through implementing them all and hoping they’ll give sales a little lift.

Talking of sales lifts … The first novel in the K’Barthan series is in a free anthology of first in series books. I’ve included it in my mailing list and I give it a plug every now and again but clearly one of my fellow authors in that enterprise—someone with a lot more mailing list clonk than I have—has plugged it too. This has resulted in couple of sales of the second, third and fourth books in that series and in one case, all my books from my online store. Which is grand. I enjoyed watching someone on Kobo hoover them up in about three days as well.

You see, there are advantages to having shit sales, you can watch someone methodically work their way through your stuff and feel good about it. Because the thing about my books is that when I can actually persuade someone to read one, they nearly always read everything I’ve written afterwards. It’s just that they have to be forced into starting one at gunpoint.

Have I done any writing?

I did a big chunk on Tuesday, but haven’t been able to do much since. Can’t win ’em all.

Other splendid things.

This week … well last week actually but I forgot to say … I had a rather smashing windfall. There is a convention for self published authors that runs every year called the Self Publishing Show. I went the first year (2020, two weeks before lockdown) and really enjoyed it. There was a talk by Joanna Penn about selling on all vendors rather than just Amazon, which made me feel I might have a chance to get somewhere with my stuff.

Since then, I haven’t been. This is mainly because the head honcho put his books exclusive with Amazon and so it all began to feel a bit Amazon-centric. This year, however, the line up looks really interesting and is much more varied, so when there was a reply-here-and-you-may-win tickets post in one of the groups I’m part of in Circle, I left a comment … and won a ticket!

So that’s grand.

On the downside, it involves a 6 am start and runs for two days and of course, the only day the removal company could collect the stuff from Mum’s was the day before, which also involves a 6 am start.

Three 6 am starts in a row is … well let’s just say, I’ll need to go to bed very early and eat extremely carefully because I will be extremely worried about waking the Bum Kraken or riding the Vomit Comet again. Fingers crossed.

Ho hum. Never mind.

Other things this week. I was 56 years old on Wednesday. That was scary but also fun because I managed to make a reasonably decent cake and McMini, who shares a birthday with me, wanted chocolate for the first time ever! At last! After 16 years I was able to indulge myself with my favourite flavour. I tried to make fondant icing. It went very wrong, well, no, that’s not true. In cookery, he who dares wins. It’s only gone wrong if it tastes like Satan’s bile and this didn’t.

Unfortunately, though, I made it too early and then realised that the cake was still warm, so the cake had to go in the freezer, and while I was sorting that out, the icing began to cool and set in the bowl. Finally, it curdled into an unpleasantly oily mess. I remembered being told that if something curdles to add more fat except I had used all the butter in the house so I had to add a spoonful of cooking oil, along with some water, which the recipe specified anyway. What I ended up with was a luxuriantly gloopy variant of butter icing so all was not lost. It was just … different.

It’s very moorish and I have put on 4lbs by looking at it. Two days of indulgent eating and boom it’s lip up fattie. Never mind. I can lose it again next week.

McMini and I each got presents, which were fun. It felt weird not ringing Mum, not paying the Mum cheque into our accounts and … yeh. It felt weird. Although, I think the best present for me was that probate has been granted on Mum’s. Woot.

I’m waiting for the actual letter from HMRC to arrive before I let the estate agent know but hopefully this means we can now go ahead with the sale, probably in July. That will make it all hands to the pump but at the same time, it’ll be over sooner, so there’s that.

Right that’s it from me. I will see you next week.

Future Adventures

If you’re interested in that free anthology of first in series books you can find out more by clicking this link here.