Daynote - Thu 13 Feb

A wee bit of rain on my walk this morning, just as I turned the mid-point and started walking back along the beach. Bracing and damp but not miserable. I should really get some of that re-proofing spray for my waterproof jacket and go out more often when it's like that. I live in Scotland after all.

Last night I went to visit the students at the Edinburgh outpost of Arcadia Abroad, a US-wide study abroad program run from Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. It was a really lovely evening - a half hour or so of me talking about my writing and my career so far (including a bit of a dive into the not-discussed-enough aspects of balancing a day job/life with writing), a Q&A and then a wee drinks reception after. I really, really enjoyed it and I think the students did too.

ON DECK: My train journeys in and out of town last night gave me some time to noodle on plot points, so this morning went well again, with 2,083 words over 90 minutes or so. The micro-outlining really makes such a difference. Not sure what a scene's even doing in the document? Take a quick look at the bullet points you did a few days ago, then start typing.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I had a couple of questions about the kinds of things that I really struggled with when I was starting to write and it was very handy to have been writing this blog for ages, because I found that the answers to those questions were directly at hand. So here's what I was asked. How do you come up with ideas? How do you make yourself write? How do you motivate yourself? How do you learn to edit your work? I basically gave potted versions of all of those posts to the attendees, but you get the long versions.

LISTENING: I greatly enjoyed this interview with AK Benedict over at the Read and Buried Podcast.

WATCHING: For Reasons related to a new project I've been researching 'spin gravity' as a concept and I absolutely loved this video from the Overview Effekt, which made several aspects of the theory way clearer to me, as well as absolutely blowing my mind with the scale of some of the Big Objects in Space in some of my favourite SF novels, films and TV shows.

READING: Just about finished with WINTERING by Katherine May. It's mostly won me over in the last quarter, with some gorgeous writing. Next on the stack is THE TYRANNY OF FAITH from Richard Swan, I think? Not sure yet.

As an aside, I've been really struggling with reading regularly for a couple of years, especially with the uptick in activity related to publishing. And that has coincided with a massive increase in the amount of reading I'm doing as part of the writing and publishing process (beta reads, crit reading, reading for blurbs and so on), with the result that my reading-for-pleasure progress on my enormous backlog of books absolutely plummeted.

But I've been reading on my lunchbreaks consistently for the last couple of weeks (instead of just 15 minutes of exhausted re-reading the same sentence before falling asleep each night) and reading after work a couple of days too. And, crucially, in the same way as I have for my writing time, fully removing as many distractions as possible. Phone in another room, for example. Surprise surprise, books now take me 3-4 days to finish instead of 4-5 weeks. Funny how that works.

LINK: Chuffed to see fellow DHH client Richard Swan is doing an SF novel (his original self-published trilogy was SF, so this is a return rather than a wholly new endeavour). THE INFINITE STATE has an absolutely fantastic pitch too.

UP NEXT: Off to Napier tomorrow to lecture about writing short fiction, which I'm really looking forward to. And I suspect I'll get some drafting done too. Might even do a bit of work on PROJECT SHARD. Then a busy weekend with family and friends, then back to PROJECT SCARLET on Monday. Broke 75K today!

Onward!