Daynote - Mon 14 Apr
A rainy Monday of cutting words.
I'd planned to get out for a walk this morning, but it started pouring with rain halfway through my writing session, so I gleefully extended it to get a little ahead of myself.
ON DECK: A cracking -2,854 words this morning, though 1,500 words of that was cutting a whole string of scenes neatly out of the first part of the book, after my wonderful critique partners pointed out that a) they were filler and not doing much narratively and b) they could all be painlessly excised since there was already a single sentence in a later scene that adequately covered the same ground. So out they go, followed by a bunch of chunky line cuts.
All this energetic cutting has got me down to 111,000 words, so I'm well over the halfway point now in my edit, with about 45,000 words remaining to edit. This cutting is doing a combination of word count reduction and first-pass consistency and continuity, but I'm hoping to give myself a few thousand words of breathing room to expand and slow down a few scenes later, because this first draft is feeling a tiny bit breathless at the moment. It's a thriller, so it's supposed to be fast-paced, but if you don't give the reader any time to breathe you can rob the whole thing of impact because they never get the chance to think about what's happening.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: I'm caught up now with my Supernote notes, so I need to prioritise reading this thing and build up a bit of a lead on myself over the next couple of days.
Interestingly, I thought I'd be using the Digest feature a lot more during this edit, but in practice I've nearly always annotated directly onto the page, I think because I'm so focused on word count. I think I'll use Digest more when I'm filling things back out after the cut, and fixing the inevitable timeline/continuity issues. I have been using Digest for the beta reads I'm doing though, and it's amazing for that.
LISTENING: I really enjoyed Robert Jackson Bennett's interview with Page One on Friday. I'm biased because the hosts are friends, but they really do have an amazing ability to land excellent interviewees.
WATCHING: Caught up on the GLADIATORS finale last night, which was a lot of fun, then another episode of THE STUDIO. You can really feel the deep love for cinema from everyone involved in this show, along with delight at skewering Tinseltown. It's great.
READING: More PROJECT SCARLET. Really have to speed up though, my backlog of reading is getting out of control.
LINK: Excellent review for THE MIDNIGHT KING (which I went to the launch of last week). Congrats Tariq!
UP NEXT: Reading reading reading, all week long. Plus our fence getting replaced, which should be interesting. Busy, in other words! But a four day week and long weekend to follow is very welcome. Onward!