Good morning, friends and fans!
Welcome to another “Peek Into My Week”, a behind the scenes look into the (I hope) interesting events occurring in my daily life!
September 06, 2021.
For the most part, my weeks are the usual ensemble of dreary routine events – work, book marketing, finding time to write, highlights, lowlights, tinkering on Dolly (my 1962 Beetle and daily transport), arguing with my wife about dinner, tripping over cats, or rearranging the furniture – but just occasionally something interesting happens, interesting enough to want to tell someone about!
Here then, for your enjoyment, is my recollection of noteworthy events in my past week!
While I’ve been posting these journal entries, it’s probably come to your attention that while I’m a writer I’m also just an ordinary person with an ordinary everyday life, and ordinary everyday person problems! That’s all I ever hope to be, no matter how much success I achieve as a writer! That said, let’s take a look at the past week – excuse the occasional rants!
Overall it was a fairly quiet but busy week!
Monday:
New Book Trailer Videos For Quantum – And More!
Those Pesky Windshield Rubbers!
Miscellaneous
Tuesday:
In the morning while I was checking out the back-end of my website, I discovered a message left for me on the 18th of August. Unlike most of the time, where it turns out to be spam, this was a lovely message from Carol, which I’ve included below:
Good Morning Ms. Engela,
I would just like to say a quick word of thanks! As a youth services librarian and educator, I’ve been running a fun writing workshop for 12-15 year olds during these times of remote learning, and thought you might enjoy hearing that we were able to get some great use out of your post, ‘Some Great Resources for Writers’ writers’ and the links you’ve listed there. We were even able to use some of this information for our most recent group project! Thanks so much for sharing!
I hope you don’t mind, but one of our youngest, Anna has also asked me if I could share an article that she and her mother found together on writing for film and theater, which includes a great breakdown on understanding the importance of setting, writing for different kinds of stage productions, how to write in a way that translates to the screen, etc.
I’ve included it below if you’d like to review! We noticed you don’t have this one listed, but Anna was actually the one to bring up that this could be something you might like to include for other young writers who could also be coming across your information and have an interest in becoming a script or screen writer some day, like Anna! If you find you are able to use this one, would you please let me know?
We’re meeting tomorrow virtually, and I would absolutely love to surprise Anna if you’re able to do so – I’m hoping to keep spirits up in light of what’s been happening across the country this past year, and I think it would make her day to know she was able to ‘pay it forward’ (we’re pretty big on this principle in our children’s library group) and maybe even show her mother her contribution if it ends up being included!
christinaengela.com/some-great-resources-for-writers/
Thanks again for all your help here Christina,
Carol https://www.theaterseatstore.com/blog/writing-for-theater-film
I sent the following reply.
Hello Carol and Anna!
Firstly, I must apologize for my late reply – sometimes I don’t see all the notifications from my website right away, but I’m glad I discovered your message while doing some website maintenance this afternoon! I do hope it’s not too late?
Thank you so much for your message – and I’m very happy to hear that you found something useful in my article! I’ll be updating it again soon and I’ll definitely include the link you sent in the update!
I was always told that writing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration – and I have to say that’s very true! Best of luck Anna, with your pursuit of being a playwright or scriptwriter!
Thanks again for your message Carol and Anna, and for your input – you’ve brightened my day!
I wish you the best in these trying and difficult times!
Stay safe and keep well!
Kind regards,
Christina Engela
Wednesday:
It being the 1st of the new month, I released my newsletter for September: Christina Engela’s Monthly Newsletter: #57 September 2021.
Seals…Again
Wednesday was the big day for fitting Dolly’s new windscreen seals, so at 10AM I headed down to the workshop! When I arrived, Johan and his crew set about stripping out the front and rear windscreens – which revealed some of that nasty thing called metal cancer… rust! I had an idea there would be a little lurking beneath the rubber seals – but I wasn’t expecting quite as much as we found! Then again, Dolly is still in very nice condition for a 60 year old car!
Anyway, since the window had to go back in again within the next 2 hours or so, with their new seals, Johan whipped out the wire brush, rust converter and glass fiber body filler to do a temporary repair. It was also given a quick coat of matching paint just to help seal it from moisture.
After that, they moved on to the front end of the car, where there was more rust which had been hiding away under the old perished rubber seals! Johan gave it the same treatment.
That done, it was time to refit the rubber seals… unfortunately, that’s where things started to go wrong. The rubber seals were not exactly the same as the originals and because the little chrome beading strips that surround the glass needed to be fitted in place before installing the windows, the train started to derail at this point! After struggling to refit the rear window for about an hour, Johan called in a windscreen expert for advice. After another half hour of heating the rubber seals in hot water and applying dishwashing soap to the seals, they tried again. Another 20 minutes of struggle resulted in the worst sound you could possibly not wish to hear under the conditions – the sound of cracking windshield glass! Another hour later though, and the front and rear (replacement) windows were installed… but I was asked to return on Saturday morning so they could redo the job! At least in the meantime, Dolly’s windshields will no longer leak, so it’s a start! I hope it will all be sorted out come Saturday!
Thursday:
Thursday was the first day in a long while where it looked like rain, that I didn’t feel concerned about the care getting wet inside! It was a liberating feeling, but I still can’t wait to have the correct seals fitted properly, which would hopefully happen on Saturday!
That aside, I’ve been doing the obligatory marketing online. I’ve been adding a book per day to my profile on Book Hunt, a book and author promotion site I joined a few years ago (and forgot about! ) Marketing is a slow, painful business that slowly, slowly pays off (if ever LOL) but since I started updating my book list there this week I have received one vote and 29 points! I’m not sure what any of that means, but I’m glad for the activity and interest, which shows that there is some movement on that site so I’ll keep on sharing my books there until I have them all up!
Friday:
I’d been feeling a bit under the weather the previous few days and aside from going to work and home again for the duration, haven’t really achieved anything worth mentioning at all. For several months of each year I have a perpetual post-nasal drip which has been attributed to sinusitis, so I take antihistamines for that – but that also has the effect of making me drowsy. For the last 3 or 4 days I’ve been really tired and low on energy – which makes concentrating a bit difficult, so I’ve been resting as much as I can! Fear not, one day soon I’ll get back into writing again!
Saturday:
I got up far earlier than I really wanted to on Saturday morning, then dragged on my clothes, quickly ate breakfast cereal, and took Dolly down to the workshop for the anticipated seeing-to of her window rubbers – only to be met with an absence of Johan, and subsequently an apology and a message relayed via an employee that he hadn’t yet collected more new window rubbers and would message me on Monday about a new date. Somewhat annoyed that I could’ve been spared an early, rushed morning by a simple message on WhatsApp, I went back home again wishing I’d never bothered with this project in the first place and had rather made the best of a bad situation by rubbing silicone over the old perished rubbers instead. After all, it seems to me that regardless of what it is I do, I pay the same money as other people, but I always seem to get second rate service and results!
After that early morning disappointment, the love of my life and I went out to take care of a few errands in town, and then retreated home to get our weekend back on!
The power went off three times during the evening, anything up to two hours per time – fortunately we had the UPS so we could still have lights and our media center still operated through it! The municipality had only last month audaciously increased our electric bill by about R200 – for a service which is unreliable and apparently in decline. To say I’m disgusted by this sad state of affairs is an understatement – unfortunately that’s what you get when corrupt politicians, crapitalists and tenderpreneurs run a country – and, unfortunately, this city.
Sunday:
Cheers!
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All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2021.