Daynote - Fri 7 Feb

A very frosty one today, ground iron-hard under my feet. No deer this morning, but beautiful full sunlight for the first time. It's been a long time since I left the house with the sun already up, but this is that wonderful period in February when the days begin to lengthen quite rapidly. I often think of February as the Tuesday of the year (and I don't much like Tuesdays either) but the light coming back is hard to beat.

ON DECK: A solid morning today, with a couple of new scenes in the bag and 1,732 words drafted. Didn't quite hit 10k for the week, but I'm pretty happy nonetheless. I've now hit 43k words drafted for the year so far, which is a marked improvement on last year already.

A couple of cool emails yesterday, reviewing and saying an enthusiastic yes to a couple of things I'll hopefully be able to shout about soon. But otherwise it's been a quietish week - no events, no mega huge secret news, just getting things done. I'm also drowning a bit in writerly admin - having a second job makes things a lot more complicated. But a lot of it isn't that bad, when you get down to it.

LISTENING: An excellent episode of the Page One Podcast with Jay Kristoff in my feeds this morning. Always fascinated by folks who mix solo writing with collaborative work. And this episode has a lot of fun anecdotes about both.

WATCHING: Jumped into Season 2 of SAS ROGUE HEROES yesterday and it's excellent. Pretty brutal opener for the season with the invasion of Sicily. It continues to balance humour and darkness very well.

READING: A couple of chapters of Eve Smith's THE CURE yesterday, which is starting to crank up the tension. It's got a very clever nested two POV double timeline structure that is working really well to slowly reveal crucial information.

LINK: John Bull (aka Garius), who also does amazing history threads on various platforms, has this handy guide to rejecting the horrendous Microsoft Copilot forced price increase. I still can't believe they thought they'd get away with this. A real breach of user trust.

UP NEXT: Two events next week, one at Arcadia in the evening and then a volunteering day at Napier. I'm really looking forward to both.

Other than that, it's full steam ahead on PROJECT SCARLET - hoping to get another 8-10k next week, possibly a bit more if I'm travelling for events. At some point I need to start working on PROJECT SHARD edits. They're not due until April, but if I don't make a start on them soon-ish I'll forget what the hell the book is even about and then have to panic re-read it in March. Slow and steady wins the race.

Onward!