Daynote - Fri 6 Dec
Hey look it's Friday.
A very nice, sunny morning today. Crisp and not too windy. Perfect for a walk.
ON DECK: I was adding more words this morning, so my aggegrate word count reduction was less than yesterday at -476 words, but I got to re-read several scenes that I haven't read in a while and they held up pretty well. I chopped a lot of extraneous words, added a few hints and foreshadowings and got very nearly to the end of the first part of the book (it's split into three major parts of 30-40k each).
One of the pieces of feedback I got from both my agent and beta readers was to get to the central plot strand quicker, and I'm now getting there about 10k words/eight chapters earlier, so I've ticked that particular note off on my edit list. And I'm now definitely sure that I made the right decision to just crack on and do another front-to-back edit.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: The Focus app continues to be horrifyingly effective at limiting my procrastination. I'm slightly annoyed with myself that I didn't give this category of app another look a bit earlier. It would have helped a lot over the last couple of years in particular.
LISTENING: Enjoyed this interview with Barnaby Walter over at the Page One Podcast.
WATCHING: We watched the penultimate episode of DAY OF THE JACKAL last night and it was an absolute corker. It's been very, very interesting to see how far and in what ways the TV series has diverged from the blade-thin, singularly-focused narrative of the original novel (and the very faithful film adaptation) and it's really a masterclass in creating a very different story from a common starting point. Personally I also think it's a more interesting story, given the additional depth and complexity it's added. The novel is a classic for a reason, but the tension in it is a single line running taut through the whole book, with the inexorable progress of the assassin towards his target. This show is more like a spider's web, centrally focused but with far more strands. It's really, really good.
READING: Absolutely loving JUSTICE OF KINGS - I go through intermittent reading slumps where nothing really catches me and it takes me two or three weeks to get through even moderate length books. But I am absolutely roaring through this and enjoying living in a vividly detailed secondary world fantasy in a way I haven't for years.
LINK: In my day job, I design digital interfaces for a living. So it's fairly rare that the world of fiction and my day job intersect. But I really love the website HUDS + GUIS, which is all about interfaces and technology in TV and film, which have to balance looking like an actual functional interface with communicating plot information in a reliable and clear way. Their recent post on Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning is excellent.
UP NEXT: Decisions may have been made, but I haven't heard about them yet, so I'll do what I always must in these situations, and just keep working. But, after two days of much more focused editing sessions, I'm feeling a lot more confident about hitting my end-of-year deadline for PROJECT SHARD.