Daynote - Mon 7 Apr

A deeply frustrating evening and morning today, where I went to bed late trying to fix an issue, then burned most of my writing time trying to fix the same issue. No luck so far. More in the tools section below.

ON DECK: A deeply annoying -110 words only this morning, cut in desperation at the end of a session largely wasted on the below. Sometimes this happens. Something goes wrong in the manuscript or the export and you spend your writing time fighting with technology. I'll try and use my lunchbreak to get a bit more, but sometimes you just have to take the loss and crack on.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: Edit: Update on the below - turned out this was a combined Scrivener/Dropbox/Me failure - it looks like I accidentally overwrote the good version of the file with one that had broken pagination, but the change went unnoticed because I had wifi turned off on my Supernote. When I turned on wifi to update the Supernote software, it downloaded the broken version. The timing was coincidental. Massive thanks to the Supernote team for helping me figure this out. I've got my notes back, which is a huge relief.

I've been happily using my Supernote Manta for the last few weeks to mark up the manuscript of PROJECT SCARLET. Then I (extremely unwisely) updated the firmware last night, which very helpfully reset all my ePub files to their default text size, margin and line spacing.

Supernote also appear to have changed how they render ePubs in some fashion, because even though I manually went through all 63 possible combinations of text size, margin and line spacing, deleting and re-uploading my .mark annotation file each time, I can't get the annotations to match up with the text. So now, I have the annotations and I have the file, but they can't be used effectively together. So my reading and editing work of the past few weeks was pointless.

I'll soldier on and just edit on screen in Scrivener, but I'm furious, both with myself for updating software mid-project (NEVER AGAIN) and with Supernote for deploying a breaking change like this without warning users. I've emailed their support people, but I'm not hopeful.

LISTENING: I really enjoyed this episode of Confessions of a Book Collector with Barnaby Martin. His book sounds really interesting.

WATCHING: Bit of GLADIATORS (daft and fun) and SEVERANCE (eerie and slow-moving) over the weekend.

READING: Just about finished with GOGMAGOG, about twenty pages left to go. I meant to finish it last night but the above tech annoyance derailed my evening plans.

LINK: Very pleased to see some friends and peers on the Hugo and Astounding Awards shortlists. Congrats to all the nominees.

UP NEXT: Very irritable editing - I'd been going back and forth on the usefulness of the Supernote and whether it'd be quicker for me to just dive in and edit directly on screen, but now I'm finding that, robbed of my annotated ePub, where I'm reading as a reader, it's kind of hard to get back into each scene and pick where to start cutting.

I might create a copy of the file, clean of annotations, then carry on editing on the Supernote from where I left off previously, with the hope that the previous version can be restored if I keep a backup copy. But when these things happen my trust drops markedly, and I don't really have the time to waste.

Ah well, onward!