April 28, 2023
Daily Diary, Day 969: I passed the 400 substack subscribers mark yesterday. First of all, a thanks to all of you who have so faithfully subscribed to a daily newsletter, what I see as a real act of kindness by all of you, which motivates me to keep moving (physically), researching, and writing.
I noted the milestone because it has taken me nearly a year to get these last 100 subscribers. The first month, 300 of you signed on almost immediately, I assume because you had already been faithfully following me on Facebook and on my website. The last 100 have obviously come more slowly and have often represented what seems to be called in the media business “churn.”
I am not surprised, given that I have been doing the same thing as I have explored substack, subscribing long enough to see if a given newsletter has enough of interest to keep me subscribed, and in some cases, then unsubscribing, in others, decided to support the newsletter by going paid.
In any event, you are all precious to me, and I hope that this coming year that I will be able to provide enough posts of interest to keep you all entertained and perhaps even get another 100 or more subscribers (500 sounds like a nice number—smile).
Today, I spent the morning doing two of the tasks on the list I published yesterday. Since my hope is that with the publication of book four in my Caelestis series, some people will decide to go back and buy and read the first books in the series, I wanted to make sure there were no glitches (again the jargon is no friction between the impulse and the actual decision to buy.
To that end I updated the Books2Read universal link for all the Caelestis series books. With this one link readers can go to the product pages of the different retailers for ebook, print, and audiobook editions, and the link will even take you to the right international store—very handy. Then I went to my webpage and made sure all the links on all the book pages for this series of books were working. This took time, and sure enough I did find a few links that were broken, so it was worth doing.
Then, after Rio came over for the doggie play date, I decided to switch and do the weekly upstairs clean today rather than tomorrow, skipping the walk, but doing the PT. This was in response to the fact that I am still finding myself very stiff at night, with some of the old flexor muscle problems during the day that the PT is supposed to address. So, I am trying to make sure I don’t have 2 long cleaning days in a row-where I don’t do either walking of PT. I must say, aging seems to be a process of constant experimentation of what works and is sustainable.
At least I seem to have achieved, through similar experimentation, a diet that satisfies me and maintains my blood sugar, so that’s a good thing. Speaking of diet, I am off to fix my lovely salad, and I the 60 minutes of cleaning and PT exercise must have done something because I am quite hungry!
Back from lunch and a phone call, and time to move to working on my mini-biographies for the short story. Here are rose blooms from the house in the neighborhood with the best rose garden.