Daynote - Fri 24 Jan
It's a trifle blustery out.
Just about jumped out of my skin last night when we got a red weather warning on our phones right across Scotland, complete with Cold War nuclear attack level siren blaring out of the phone.
As such, I decided it'd be a bad idea to go walking through the woods, where there's a lot of sketchy-looking branches overhead from the last few named storms that blew through. So far it's pretty damn windy here in East Lothian, but everything is weighted down in our garden, charged up inside in case we lose power and we're carrying on. It's supposed to start in earnest around 10am.
And on the plus side, no walk this morning meant more time for writing.
ON DECK: A really solid 2,042 words this morning and I've just about caught up to my revised drafting plan. Shortening the timescale for my first draft has taken me from being about 5,000 words ahead of schedule to about 300 words behind schedule in the space of a week, which is a bit annoying, but I will catch that up pretty easily I think. Being slightly behind schedule is annoying me a little, so I may squeeze in a tiny bit of weekend writing just to nudge back over that line.
I used to be a hardcore daily word target guy, and I'm always slightly wary of focusing too much again on word count. But the working reality of being published and working under contract means there are now deadlines, so even if I'm not holding myself rigidly to a Stephen King-like 2K per day, every day, I do still need to roughly know how much I have to write and whether I'm in the right ballpark. And so far, it's going well.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: I found a very cool research tool via a random Instagram post today - it's called ShadeMap, and it allows you to enter a time, date and location, anywhere on Earth, and see a calculated map of the sun's rays and whether any given point is in shade or not. Very, very cool for getting a sense of how the light might look in different places. Here's central Edinburgh at lunchtime yesterday.
LISTENING: Chilling out to the Hypnagogue Podcast again this morning.
WATCHING: I thought this explainer video from the Met Office here in the UK about Storm Éowyn was excellent - calm, methodical, clear and comprehensive. More of this kind of thing please.
READING: Read a bit more Boat Book last night and enjoyed a very dramatic scene followed by a welcome emotional escalation. I can't wait to tell Mo and Erin (aka MK Hardy) how well they've done with this book.
LINK: If you're a Clarkesworld reader, the annual Clarkesworld Reader Poll nomination phase closes today. My story 'Kardashev's Palimpsest' is eligible. If you enjoyed it, I'd love your nomination.
UP NEXT: Like I said, I've gone from being well-ahead to slightly behind, which doesn't feel great. But it's only slightly. And I nudged over the 45k mark on PROJECT SCARLET this morning, so overall I think it's going pretty well. That means I should hit the halfway point on the draft next week.
I may, as I said, sneak in 300 words just to catch up to that blue line in Pacemaker over the weekend, and I also now have some edits to consider on PROJECT SHARD which will have to be weekend work, since I don't want to halt the momentum I have on SCARLET.
Plenty to do, in other words. Onward!