Birdies!

There were lots of birdies at the feeders this morning. I was most excited to see this Goldfinch on the finch feeder (where else?). He hasn't started to turn bright yellow yet but that's coming. March is the month that Spring arrives in, after all. Also next Saturday night Daylight Saving Time arrives but I am not going to break out my annual rant about that. Not yet anyway.

 

Then I saw two Mourning Doves crowded together on the platform feeder. By the time I got the camera up and on they had moved to the sides of the feeder so they weren't bumping into each other like they had been a minute before. And this way you can see them better anyway.

 

I spent the evening catching up on emails from the last few days and there was one from ProWritingAid which is an app I have for tidying up punctuation, grammar, and usage in my writing. They have a new service called Manuscript Analysis and they gifted subscribers with one free analysis so I pushed the button and let 'er rip. It took about 35 minutes but it went through Spies Don't Retire and gave a pretty comprehensive analysis of the story. The big thing that caught my attention was they classified it as a cozy mystery. It isn't. But they were pretty spot on about the rest of the story. It's 27 pages that goes through setting, characters, narrative themes, and a bunch of other things. It pointed out a few scenes that need revision or elimination. I'll take it along next weekend and see if I can't effect some changes, if I agree.

 

Then I spent a productive hour on Publisher Rocket looking up keywords and categories for Spies Don't Retire. This is the page of keywords I found. There are 16. I need 7, so I'm in good shapes. I had a harder time finding categories because Amazon has a limited list of them and my books fit in very few of them.

 

I watched the next two segments of the beginning watercolor class and
painted some circles and triangles. They were supposed to be on two sheets of paper but I used my artistic license and combined them. Tomorrow we get to make a design, not a picture, but strokes and colors. Just in case you're wondering, the colors were supposed to bleed into each other.

 

I met GBB at the book fair in DePere after lunch and we walked around talking to authors, handing out cards, and considering whether we wanted to take part next time. This one isn't free to vend at. It was $40 and I wonder whether people made that back. Thinking about it since there didn't seem to be any books like mine represented.

--Barbara