Daynote - Mon 21 Apr

It's Easter Monday and a bank holiday in Scotland, so I had a very long lie and am not quite fully started. But there's writing afoot, so here's a daynote.

The picture above is from sunset yesterday - we had a very nice Sunday lunch with family, then had friends over for dinner and went for a walk to the beach. It was lovely.

ON DECK: Still working on the main word count cut for PROJECT SCARLET - I'm in the final part (it's a five part book) of the novel and still have about 6,000 words to cut, so I'm not sure I'll quite get there in this pass. But I'll be doing another pass on the front half of the book where I'm reasonably sure I will get whatever's left, probably 2-3k. We'll see. No word count yet, because it's a bank holiday and I haven't started work yet. I'll update this post when I finish up.

Edit: a very solid -1,685, and I'm under 105k. Chuffed.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I'm pretty excited to do a second readthrough of my book (well, as excited as I can be about reading the same book twice in less than a month) with the Supernote. In the first readthrough I was very focused on word count, whereas this readthrough will be focused on everything else - continuity, character development, timeline accuracy, research double-checking. All the fiddly bits, basically.

Supernote has a feature called 'keywords' which will be invaluable with this - basically I can tag any page with multiple keywords by writing the word, circling it and then creating a new keyword or matching to an existing one. That means I can build lists of, for example, every page in the book where a date or time is mentioned. Or everywhere that a particular character is described. This will save me a huge amount of time in the edit, because I can systematically work my way through those lists instead of just Cmd-F'ing my way around the book hoping I've caught every instance of an issue.

LISTENING: It was a long weekend, so I got in a bunch of podcast listening. So here's two links for you - first up was Katherine Arden (author of THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS) in an excellent appearance on the Talking Scared podcast. And the second was the Coode Street Podcast talking to Joe Monti of Saga Press, which was a dose of optimism I didn't know I needed about the state of play in SFF publishing in the US.

WATCHING: We really enjoyed WILD MEN, which is just about to leave Amazon Prime - it's a Danish/Norwegian comedy about a man who has a mid-life crisis and goes into the mountains of Norway to try living like a Neolithic hunter-gatherer (it's not going well, as we learn almost immediately) then ends up caught up in a cross-border drug deal. Reminded us a lot of IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE, a black comedy with Stellan Skarsgård from a few years ago, as well as the darker moments of FARGO.

READING: I am full steam ahead on ALL THE COLOURS OF THE DARK in advance of my event with Chris at the end of the month and it is blowing me away, to be frank. Gorgeous book.

LINK: Huge congratulations to artist Jenni Coutts, who won a BSFA award at the weekend for the cover of Nova Scotia 2, the anthology I was in last year.

UP NEXT: A chill day today once the writing's done, then back to the normal routine from tomorrow. I'm reasonably sure I'll finish this first edit of PROJECT SCARLET this week, possibly even before the end of the week. We'll see.

Onward!