These days I skim around other writers like a pebble over water attracted by the twinkles and the chinks of light or the sound of distant laughter but then, like the pebble, I sink into isolation. I need to be more wood? Wood floats. May be I will start to be an utter plank. Normally, I am a kind and chatty soul after all I have been around a bit now and none of this stays the same and one good power cut from a war to many and all these words and endeavours are gone.

I have been in a few writing groups over the years on line – some I left PDQ and some I stayed years and very much enjoyed. But people change and things change and these places can linger becoming somewhere between a plague ship, a ghost ship and  – worst of all  – a Titanic were the thing goes down and all connections are severed.  With the modern membership/subscription type things it’s often a reversal it gets busier but often the early friends drop out unable to pay /unwilling to pay for what was a ‘friendship’. Those sites become echo boxes of clamour with no substance at all until the creator realises they too are talking to them selves amongst strangers again.

Bottom line is that this week I sorted out a real wasp nest here on the farm that was causing issues for others. But, I also left a small online wasp nest behind – it served it’s purpose the last few weeks as I wrote into my days as a warm up  but I am unsurprised that I have baled out – I would rather be on my own writing my books than dodging forum weirdness any time and the fact is that in being there and chatting away and ‘being accountable’ for my plans and goals I am actually contributing enormously to preserving the illusion that the lights are on and folks are home. They aren’t.

I need to be chatting on with gusto here where it might benefit me and my writing – or may be on Sub Stack or somewhere else and so I baled on my old haunt – and as I jumped I protected my nose less I fall flat on it – after last week…!

In other news the hay got baled dry in the local area and here – good job hay makers 🙂

Have I done any writing on the fiction? No.

I did contact Sam Davis at Website Right and get him to check the web sites and have a look at Mail Chimp and good job I did – so I now have the choice returned to me again of the three web sites; and thanks to Sam they do have a pop up sign up for an email list. I have to do some thinking about these and how the things work behind the scenes – if they do  – and then get back to writing on.

And then I woke up Tuesday with a bug. Not COVID. A summer cold. Oh dear! Well, I don’t like tinkering under the bonnets of the old web sites but having ‘a cold’ and doing it worked quite well as I couldn’t do anything else!

I am feeling better now and having rediscovered something I wrote on one of them about the ‘10% rule’ I feel I have applied that pretty well quite by chance.

Nothing is ever truly lost: camouflaged knife just where i left it!

It is the begining of Q3 on Monday, July 1st so I also checked over the kan ban board and moved the sticky notes around and was quite pleased with how Q2 went in terms of that.

I got a new Poprun 17 month diary (vertical spread) – a sort of half wiro A4 in a fetching teal colour so that should keep my days in order I guess.

What else? Am thinking of daily Blogging on the sites to record and journal – and get used to that again – and I am still thinking about Sub Stack and a role that might have  – and I have seen a ‘thing’ that might replace Adobe for me – a one off fee but it has just been bought out by Canva so I am not sure about that.

Also if I use en and em dashes it is because – I do it is how we English were taught when I was at school – not because I use AI 🙂

And today, Friday I felt well enough to drive along the coast road to look at the view never mind I know it is there!

But I drove down out of the clouds to my favourite gardens at Abbotsbury for a chat, an almond croissant and a lovely cup of coffee😀

A good week.