My Dad Is 70

Image: Diffusibility

My father is 70 years old today.

70.

David Currie Galbraith is officially a 70 year old man.

I emphasise this for the sake of my poor mother, as it is she more than anyone else in the family, that will be feeling very old today now that she is honestly able to tell people that her husband is a 70 year old bloke.

In all seriousness though, HAPPY BIRTHDAY POP!!!

The Schedule
I have a lot to do between now and the end of my writing year on 12th August. On the 13th, a Saturday, the book festival will swing into action and with it, I too will be on full GDR alert; reviewing the year that’s been and planning the next 12 months work. And of course, lots of book events and writing inspiration as well.

I’m taking things one task at a time. I’ve planned to take each day as it comes, pick a task and work it through focussed and dedicated, while forgetting the rest is even there. Eventually, the ticks will add themselves up resulting in a productive month.

That’s the idea anyway. It’s worked before when I have a lot of targets like this.

Poolside Poetry 2
My main task for the day was to redraft and enter all 80 poems I wrote while I was away in Greece into the computer. This is a larger task than you might imagine purely from the copying and re-writing angle, but I was giving the poems their first reading since they were first splurged onto the page and making changes as I went.

It’s a great exercise though, and it’s the main benefit of writing directly into a notebook. When you come to type them all up you get the overall feel and balance of the resulting chapbook, so that individual poems apart, you can see where some poems might not fit or you may need to make changes to give the resulting book a better balance.

Media & Marketing Plan
I developed my Media & Marketing Plan for August over my lunch break and it’s pretty exciting, I have to admit. I now have the technology to be able to do everything I want to do and some of the ideas—if I can just pull them off—should hopefully make a wee splash in the social media and networking world.

I’m playing with integrated ideas involve daily blogging, podcasts, tweeting, live event tweeting, an image gallery, Facebook updates and possibly even some YouTube ideas, although this latter one will take some more thought. I’ll publish the full plan in a later post with links and in my newsletter.

In short: I’m going for it and see what happens!

iBooks
FRINGE FANTASTIC is now available on iBooks, the Apple book store that is so hard to get into. I managed it by way of the publisher taking control of it on my behalf. If you have an Apple device (iPhone, iPad, iMac, etc.) then get over there and get yourself a copy. It’s been priced at £2.99 (but you can get it on Kindle for much less!)

Ciao for now!

SPECIAL OFFER
Enter coupon code TIMEUK305 at checkout (TIME305 if outside the UK) and receive 25% off your order of my poetry books: FRINGE FANTASTIC, POOLSIDE POETRY and SILLY POEMS FOR WEE PEOPLE VOL.2. Offer cannot be applied to previous orders and only applies to books or eBooks ordered through the Lulu option. Offer expires on July 29th, 2011 at 11:59 PM.