Catching Up On Tasks During Easter Break

There’s nothing like a four-day break from the day job to catch up on home and creative projects. My husband spent two dry-weather days (the other two were rainy) doing home repairs on our house and planting our garden.

I visited my mother, who wasn’t well enough to spend Easter with us and afterward prepared a ham dinner for the rest of the family. I also took time to make a dent in endless writing projects. They weren’t all about editing, but updating records, organizing papers, and adding live links to my books.

One of the best things about now being self-published is that I can make changes to my books and reissue them when I want to, not when my publisher decides to, if they do at all. After I parted company with the publisher of my Casey Holland mysteries and obtained all rights to my books, I spent a fair bit of time going over all four manuscripts and reissuing them with new ISBNs on Amazon and through D2D (which handles Kobo, Nook, Apple books and other platforms). I was eager just to get the books posted again, but neglected to add live links so that readers could easily access all books from any book they purchased.

Two weeks ago, I finally created live links for all five books in the series, and this weekend I reissued the first four, with the exception of Knock Knock, which I’m going through again. There were a couple of errors that needed correcting.

I also caught up on the dementia journal I’ve been writing since my mother was first diagnosed over four years ago. It is now 25 single-spaced pages, and one day might be helpful in creating characters afflicted with this disease. If you have a friend or family member suffering from dementia, recording everything really helps. It might also be useful for the doctors as well.

I have to say that I’m happy with the Easter break productivity and for all of the family time I enjoyed. Heck, I even dusted parts of my office. Oddly, I didn’t eat any chocolate, but I sure did enjoy my share of wine. We have a membership at a local winery and a case of reds and whites were ready for pickup, and of course, I couldn’t just zip in and out without stopping for a little wine tasting. Yeah, it was a fun, productive weekend. I could use another four-day break like that soon.