Daynote - Mon 31 Mar
Green shoots in the woods.
Somehow it's the last day of March. Not sure how that happened. My March newsletter will be out in about three hours, so sign up if you'd like to read that.
Nice walk this morning, not a breath of wind, sun just about breaking through the clouds and flowers coming up through the leaves in the woods. Proper Spring is so close I can smell it on the wind.
ON DECK: Very solid editing session this morning, with -1,297 words cut. As expected, now that I'm getting into the first draft material, the cuts are getting bigger and easier (whole paragraphs, quite often). That took me under 121k, so I'm just about a fifth of the way to my target. Not bad.
LISTENING: I really enjoyed this wide-ranging interview at Spybrary with former SIS agent Charles Beaumont, talking about his new book A SPY AT WAR.
WATCHING: We watched SISU over the weekend, about an extremely tough Finnish former-soldier-turned-gold-miner absolutely slaughtering a platoon of retreating Nazis in 1944 after they tried to nick his gold and shoot his dog. Bonkers, over-the-top spaghetti Western stuff, but I loved it.
READING: More GOGMAGOG over the weekend, plus I started PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard after hearing Craig Mod talk about it on a recent podcast. Absolutely stunning writing.
LINK: I am extremely tempted to try out this 'DIY dumbphone method' from Casey Johnston. For about three or four years, I wasn't really on social media at all, aside from a moribund Instagram account, until 2021 when I signed up for Twitter again to do author stuff specifically. Then that imploded and I have Threads and Mastodon accounts (which I don't really use) and Instagram and Bluesky (which I do). But I've now got an old iPhone in a drawer I think I'm going to use as a dedicated 'writer social media' device I can turn off, while I make my main phone as boring and doomscroll free as I can.
UP NEXT: A quiet week this week, just chugging along on the SCARLET edit. Hopefully I'll get another 5k or so cut this week and hit roughly the 40% point of the overall edit. Onward!