Daynote - Fri 22 Nov

Morning! Woke up in Edinburgh to a beautiful winter sunrise, the vibe of which is accurately represented by the header image. I didn't take the pic above, although, fun fact, I realised after picking it from Unsplash that it was taken by a guy that I used to work with! Hi Adam!

Anyway, it's nice to be (nearly) home - I'm writing this on the connecting train back to my village (oops, didn't quite finish it - posting from home an hour later). Great day in London yesterday - a fun day job working session, lunch with colleagues followed by an evening drink, a whistlestop visit to Hatchard's on Piccadilly to sign their stock, then off to Islington for an event with excellent writer (and my friend) Lorraine Wilson, in conversation with the also-excellent Claire North. It was a great event and I'm really glad it lined up with my work trip.

ON DECK: A day off from the day job today, since I'm due in Glasgow by half five for the Christmas Shopping event at Waterstones Braehead. First though I'm going to get home, get a shower and second breakfast, then do a spot of writing work. I usually like to write these daynotes after I've done my writing work for the day and I usually do get it done on travel days while waiting for connections, but today was one of those 'not quite ready to start' mornings. I'm going to try and knock off a couple more tasks from my edit list on SHARD, and I'm also going to do some brainstorming on an as-yet-unnamed new project I haven't told anyone about. I'll come up with a cool codename when I've had more sleep.

TOOLS: I'm currently taking a look at all of my various notes and steeling myself for the big exercise of consolidating them all into one app, tagging them, removing duplicates and irrelevant old stuff, combining notes that are all slight variants of one another etc. It's a lot of quite manual work, but I do feel like it'll be worthwhile. I've been swithering on whether to take the Forever Notes approach and implement it in Obsidian, because Obsidian has some very cool stuff in it and is endlessly extensible via plugins. But Apple Notes is simple, has enough features for me to do what I need to do (tags, smart folders, note links) and is deeply integrated into both iOS generally and Shortcuts specifically. So it's the right choice. Might be a job to do over the festive break.

LISTENING: Really enjoyed this episode of Page One with Genoveva Dimova, who is another stalwart of the central Scotland SFF writing scene, a great writer and a lovely person. Also FOUL DAYS and MONSTROUS NIGHTS are both rad books and you should read them.

WATCHING: Nothing last night, I was mooching around Euston Station.

READING: I only got a tiny bit of reading done on the Tube, more PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW. But I also picked up copies of Claire North's NOTES FROM THE BURNING AGE and Lorraine Wilson's MOTHER SEA at their event, which I'm very much looking forward to diving into.

LINK: I've had this link open in a browser tab for ages, but I finally read this interview with Ken Liu on how to do more by slowing down and it chimed pretty dang hard with my experience. Enough that I have a blog post brewing on the topic.

UP NEXT: Waterstones Braehead this evening, then a weekend of moving sofas, visiting family and recovering from this week's travel. Next week, back into SHARD and trying to avoid falling into Waiting Mode where an impending decision renders me paralysed and unable to progress anything.

Edit: just noticed on publishing that this my 200th blog post on this website! These daynotes have sure pumped those numbers up. I had a long-defunct Blogspot blog, plus a Tumblr at one point, and I'm sure one or two posts have been lost in various migrations, so the 'real' number is likely higher, but as of today there are two hundred posts on this iteration of my website, which is cool.