Daynote - Tue 30th July 2024
A lovely morning and my first anthology.
Absolutely gorgeous morning here in Scotland. Great morning walk - I saw a couple of deer in the forest and Edinburgh and Fife sparkling across the water from the beach. Lovely.
And my first anthology comes out today!
ON DECK: 868 words on Ridealong this morning. I'm starting to percolate lines of dialogue and little structural things for the next Legends book (PROJECT SCARLET) while I'm writing this short story. I've never really had the very common writers ailment of Shiny Project Syndrome, where you don't finish things because you're constantly hopping to the next project. I definitely feel the impulse, but I like to use that building excitement to do some back-burner thinking while I continue drafting on the first project (in this case, Ridealong). And at a certain point, it also acts as a motivator for me to get to the end of that first project, because that back-burner slow bubbling of ideas and snippets of dialogue and scene sketches is starting to be something I'm really excited to work on. This is all in my head - I used to worry about forgetting stuff, but these days I'm more confident in my ability to keep the good stuff rattling around in my head for a few days or weeks as I finish off the first thing.
LISTENING: Living in the Library this morning, watching the sun light the houses opposite. Very chill at half six in the morning.
WATCHING: Just a bit of Youtube last night. Going to try this pancake recipe.
READING: A chapter of THE EMOTIONAL CRAFT OF FICTION. It's still in that first-three-chapters windup. This is a thing I notice a lot in non-fiction books generally and writing craft books specifically - 2 to 3 chapters of 'buy-in' to try and get across why you should continue to read the book. Which seems like a lot of pages when you're looking at a relatively slim 200 page volume in the first place. But it's good, and I'm enjoying the insights. Recommended, so far.
UP NEXT: More Ridealong, more percolating on PROJECT SCARLET. PROJECT CITRUS was my main candidate for the next Legends book, but after editorial conversations, I'm reworking SCARLET and CITRUS is going in the back pocket hopefully for a future novel. So, full focus on SCARLET next week I reckon. And I'm very excited about it.