Daynote - Mon 24 Mar

Crikey, the last full week of March, eh? And another Monday rolls around. Nice walk this morning, with a lighter jacket and no gloves and hat for the first time in a few months. Very pleasant indeed.

Yesterday I was in town and I popped into Waterstones in the West End of Edinburgh, which is a bookshop I've been going to since I was quite a small boy. My dad used to work in an office on Princes Street in the early Nineties, so I used to wait for him here sometimes. Then in the late Nineties and really ever since it's been a place I will nearly always visit when I'm at that end of town. I saw Iain Banks speak here, about a year before he died. So it's been a big part of my bookish life for a long, long time.

When I went in yesterday, I was delighted to see a copy of my book on the shelves and to get to sign it. This has been a bit of a writer bingo card square for me (signing a book at this particular bookshop), ever since I set out to get published. And yesterday I finally got to cross it off.

A very nice end to the weekend.

ON DECK: This morning I started work on PROJECT SCARLET again, on the first major edit. To hit my word count target, I need to cut an average of 560 words per working day between now and the end of May, and I got off to a good start by getting -615 words this morning. I'm especially pleased with today's cuts because these chapters have already been fairly heavily edited. That means the more raw stuff I'll be encountering later on will likely have lots of much easier cuts.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: This is my first time working off my Supernote edits and it went very well. I just popped the Supernote up on the stand that I normally put my laptop on, then paged through the manuscript, making the cuts that I identified using the Supernote, then going through each page again to look for more cuts.

I find sometimes I'll find additional single word tweaks and little salami slices of words I can make when I actually have the keyboard under my fingers, but I'm still glad I'm reading it as a book on the Supernote. Having a tiny bit of distance from the manuscript by working off an ePub makes it feel real in a way that I think tempers the instincts I might have if I just dived straight back into the editing on screen.

LISTENING: Loved this episode of the Page One Podcast with Nadine Matheson (I appeared on Nadine's podcast recently, so it was nice to see her getting the chance to be interviewed). Nadine is awesome and it's a great conversation.

WATCHING: We finished PARADISE over the weekend and wow, that's a good show. If you haven't watched it, go in cold if you can. I would also say after the initial twist we were not quite sure about it (it suffers from the 'too much hidden information without a strong initial hook' issue of many puzzle box shows) because it felt like a fairly conventional murder mystery just with a slightly wacky setting. But the last two episodes are some of the best TV I've seen in months. The penultimate episode entirely, which rivalled the THE BEAR for the 'continuous extremely stressful TV episode that never lets up' award. Highly recommended.

READING: More GOGMAGOG (weird, awesome), cyberpunk beta read (excellent) and my own PROJECT SCARLET (first draft, oof) this weekend.

LINK: The ever-excellent HUDS+GUIS has a new post about the design of the interfaces in SILO, which I really enjoyed. The whole 'hardware built to last hundreds of years' production design in that show is very cool and kind of reminds me of the chunky retro-futuristic interfaces of the ALIEN films.

UP NEXT: A solid week of work on SCARLET, then my friend Nick's book launch on Thursday, followed by a bunch of appointments on Friday. Speaking of which, I made a promo reel for Nick's book, DISSOLUTION, which you should absolutely pick up. It's brilliant.

Onward!