Daynote - Mon 25 Nov

I finally got back to my walking routine this morning, which was really nice, even though I feel like I got sandblasted at the beach. We seem to have only caught the edges of Storm Bert, though the wind howled through most of the night. A few downed branches in the woods, but otherwise okay. I hope everyone down south is doing alright.

My event at Waterstones Braehead on Friday night was great fun! First there was the drive through from Edinburgh with Nick Binge and Gareth Brown (crit partner and agent sibling respectively), then I got to meet a whole load of amazing authors, including Callum McSorley who shared my table.

Thank you to the amazing staff at Braehead who kept all of us well supplied with mince pies and the readers who stopped to chat, bought books and got them signed. It was a brilliant night.

Also, it's now one month until Christmas Day. How on earth did that happen?

ON DECK: Back into SHARD edits this morning, with a small 134 words in aggregate. Again, I'm cutting at the same time and I'm doing a lot of jumping about to add in little snippets of additional context and action beats. It's slow work, but putting in all these new bits should make the front-to-back edit for length that I'll do next a lot easier.

TOOLS: My migration to Apple tools is going... very slowly. But I'm starting to properly commit now. Reminders isn't ready for what I want to do (chiefly because of how it handles repeating todos) so Things 3 will remain as my task manager, but I've got my Apple Notes set up how I want, just about. The next step is to migrate my Obsidian notes into it.

Occasionally I take a look over at Noteplan and wonder 'hmmm, what if', but I'm not a massive fan of having all of my notes in something that I need to pay a monthly fee for. I do wish some of these startups would offer the 'pay for a year of updates' model alongside the monthly option. That always seems like the best combination to me - ongoing updates for those that want them, stable software for those that don't.

LISTENING: Writing to the latest episode of Hypnagogue this morning.

WATCHING: We finished ARCANE season 2 over the weekend. Absolutely gorgeous to look at and an intriguing open ending that might permit future seasons, if Netflix come to their senses. Really enjoyed it.

READING: I've been alternating two books over the weekend - THE PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW still, which is getting pretty tense. And THE JUSTICE OF KINGS by Richard Swan. Richard and I share an agent and I've had this on my TBR for a while. It's really, really good. And the best part is he's into a second trilogy already, so I've got plenty of excellent reading ahead.

LINK: Fellow author Lorraine Wilson has written an excellent post on the realities of ending your relationship with a literary agent - including common causes, responses and remedies. It's an excellent review of this extremely common occurrence that should be required reading for anyone newly agented. I've been agented since 2021 and I'm still with my first agent, but in that time at least five of my close friends have changed agent and a good half dozen more that I'm aware of through extended writing networks have gone through the same thing. This post is very much worth your time.

UP NEXT: This week I'll be doing my absolute best to not think about Decisions Being Made elsewhere and make really good progress on SHARD. As usual when I've got a clear objective and a time limit, my brain wants to work on literally anything else, but I'm going to do my best to crack on with it and (hopefully) clear the decks for the next major drafting project.

I'll cover this more in my end-of-year roundup post, but this year has been a low word count one for various reasons. And I'm extremely determined to end the year strong and, next year, really up my drafting game. But first, I've got to finish this edit.