Daynote - Mon 4 Nov

A quiet weekend and back into editing today

ON DECK: The call I had on Friday gave me a new priority, which is reworking the sample for PROJECT SCARLET. It's a fairly interesting editing challenge - introducing an additional character, establishing the world for new readers and kicking off the main plot in a fairly compact word count.

When I have a challenge like this, my usual approach is to write everything I think needs to be in it, at whatever length comes out in the draft. Then, once I've got all the pieces, I'll start carving chunks off it and trying to fit everything together into a cohesive, tightly-written final drafts. I nearly always find that I can lop the beginning and end of half my scenes, cut some entirely and trim endless little bits out of the dialogue and the description. But I find I need to see the whole thing before I can do that.

This morning I wrote 670 words of new character introduction. Tomorrow, I'll probably write another two or three the same length. Then by Friday, I'm aiming to cut 3k-5k out of the total length.

TOOLS: Oh, a new heading! I'm a habitual meddler in my own process, which means I fiddle with new software, processes and methods of working all the time. I thought it might be worth adding that to my regular roster of stuff I talk about.

This weekend I ported my main task lists from Things 3 (which I've used on and off since it launched, and Things 2 before that) to Apple Reminders, which I've heard is now a pretty capable task manager. That will help me easily share tasks with my wife and is baked into both my Mac's calendar and Siri on my phone. I think some aspects of it are really clunky (subtasks are super-annoying) but being able to look at an email and say 'Remind me about this tomorrow at 2pm' and have it Just Work™ is really pretty cool.

LISTENING: Back to Living in the Library again.

WATCHING: We're on the AGATHA ALL ALONG train now, and it's pretty good, while requiring minimal knowledge about WANDAVISION. And we've also started watching THE FRANCHISE on Now TV, which is a very fun British comedy that takes place on the set of a superhero franchise film. Really great cast.

READING: About halfway through DEATH IN THE ARCTIC and it's all kicking off. Nobody's dead yet, but everybody's shooting daggers, so to speak.

UP NEXT: More new scenes on SCARLET, editing everything down to fit into the word count and redistributing a bunch of scenes between viewpoints. That's going to be me at least until Friday.