My Week:
A week of travelling! Yes really. We thought we might run away from the ferocious storm cell that had settled over the east coast of NSW, throwing down metres of rain in one weekend. Only to discover that it was following us down the coast as we headed into eastern Victoria. Each night, we would arrive at our destination with a drizzle of rain on our backs, but overnight it would blow a gale and throw down lashings of rain. By lunch time the next day we would drive out of it again, only for it to turn up during the night at our new destination. It was Thursday before we spotted our first bit of blue sky.
I’m not complaining though. We’re on the road, travelling new byways and seeing new sights, with the occasional detour down memory lane. It’s so good to be out of the city, away from work, with nothing but the adventure of where to eat next on our schedules.
I may not be getting many walks along beaches, or through the bush, thanks to the weather, but I am reading quite a bit. Mr Books scoffed at the bag of books I brought away with me. But honestly, it was only all the half-read books by my bed. I decided this was as good as time as any to finish them all. Two are done and dusted already.
I Am Reading:
- Into the Loneliness: The unholy alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates | Eleanor Hogan (non-fiction)
- The Pea-Pickers | Eve Langley (whilst actually in Gippsland!)
- Émile Zola: A Very Short Introduction | Brian Nelson (Zoladdiction)
- All That Swagger | Miles Franklin (1936 Club)
- First Singular | Haruki Murakami (short stories – April new release)
- Post Captain | Patrick O’Brian (AubreyMaturinReadalong)
- This is Happiness | Niall Williams (April book club book)
- One Hundred Days | Alice Pung (June release)
- After Story | Larissa Behrendt (July new release)
Read But Not Reviewed:
- Bring Up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel (WolfHallReadalong)
- Second Place | Rachel Cusk (May new release)
New to the Pile:
Block Editor Curiosity:
- Reusable blocks not as useful or reusable as I had hoped.
- Great for posts like my Book Stop ones where I reuse the same paragraph to start each one before individualising the rest.
- But not so great for creating a template to use at the bottom of a review post to include isbn, publisher details and dates.
- Turns out that it updates ALL the posts using this block, with the info from the last save.
- I had done about 8 posts before I realised the problem.
Blogging Curiosities:
- For some reason, this past week, three of my older posts featuring my 2019 Moby-Dick readalong have been trending. I wonder why?
Winners:
- The Dictionary of Lost Words | Pip Williams won this year’s Indie Book of the Year Award after also winning her category of Debut Fiction.
Shout Outs:
- Zoladdiction with Fanda @Classiclit starts on the 1st April
- 1936 Club – 12th to the 18th April – All that Swagger | Miles Franklin (1936)
- Dewey’s 24 hr Readathon on the 24th April – sign up post is here
This Reading Life 
I’m going to Wilson’s Prom over Easter, so I’ll toot if I see you go past. Excellent selections in the top half of your Am Reading.
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Ahhh by Easter we will be back in border town country. The weather is meant to be magnificent for Easter though, so the Prom should be a great place to be.
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Thankyou re the reusable blocks! I have been wondering about whether to use it or not, but you have now warned me that I need to see it not as a template but as a copy-paste and do NOT edit thing, which does reduce its usefulness somewhat.
Glad you are having a little driving holiday. We went to Melbourne at the end of Feb-early March and took two days to get there, but four days to come home. It was so lovely. I still feel the pleasure of it nearly a month later.
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I was very disappointed with the reusable block functionality. I’m not sure that many of have a need to copy & paste huge chunks of our posts, but a reusable template would be VERY useful.
Was that your Mallee drive? I enjoyed the pics on Insta of the painted silos.
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Yes it was. Been meaning to put more on Facebook, but keep at getting around to it.
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*gasp* Reusable blocks!!
You know, the one thing that would have made me use their block thingy would have been a reusable template…
Enjoy the break, LOL we forgive you for bringing the weather with you.
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I’m hoping they (the WP IT peeps) will realise the usefulness of a reusable template and add it to the portfolio. Although knowing my luck, they will create one, but only for those who sign up for the business plan!
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Yes…
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Enjoy your break Brona!
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I need to re-read your tips and hints. Until today I had the ability to return to the classic editor and I think it’s gone for good now as there’s no option at the bottom of the normal WP back-end page by which I accessed the old one. I haven’t had much luck with the blocks editor even though my posts are super-simple, esp in editing my existing pages (like my Anne Tyler project page). Scary times!
And hooray for a trip and reading time, obvs!
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Yes, fixing up old posts with block editor is trying! But I am happy with the end result when I do.
Copy & paste is usually required to clear up the weird boxes of HTML that appear when converting. I will be writing another post about these post conversions later in April, now that I’ve done a few.
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