Daynote - Thu 19 Dec
Back to the woods.
A much longed-for return to the woods this morning, which was wonderful. We're very close to the shortest day of the year, so it was dark when I sauntered into the trees, but by the time I got to the beach it was a stunning morning that quite blew the cobwebs out after a week of trains and cafes. I instantly felt a lot better.
ON DECK: A good morning, working through scenes and ending up with -162 words cut. I've started to reach the parts of the book where there's thing I need to add and develop further rather than purely line-level cutting, so it's a two steps forward, 1.75 steps back kind of process at the moment. But I'm inching ever-closer to the end. I'm also in the part of the book where the scenes start to get a lot shorter as the action picks up, so it at least feels like I'm making faster progress.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: I'm still messing around with Forever Notes, using the Journal feature mainly, which has already proved very useful in keeping a bunch of notes over the last couple of weeks. I haven't quite worked up the motivation to transfer everything from Obsidian, but maybe that will be a nice sofa task for the festive break. We'll see.
LISTENING: Back to music this morning, and my old favourite, the Bicep Essentials playlist.
WATCHING: Another episode of BLACK DOVES last night and it continues to be really, really good. Some of the sharpest dialogue I've encountered in a while.
READING: More PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW yesterday and I'm very close to finishing. I think that will be today's lunchtime reading.
LINK: Really chuffed to discover A RELUCTANT SPY on the 2024 Best Spy Books roundup from one of my favourite sites and podcasts, Spybrary. The Spybrarians are a wonderful bunch of passionate spy novel fans, so it really means a lot to be included. Thanks particularly to Martin Paul, who has been a vocal supporter of the book since he first read it on Netgalley and was the Spybrarian who added it to the list.
UP NEXT: Decisions have been made and I also got a lovely call about numbers today which was very heartening. One more day of writing work tomorrow on SHARD, then a tiny bit of editing over the weekend and then I am DONE with writing until 2025. But it's going to be a busy year. I have a lot of plans and a lot of writing to do. But I'll be posting a few more times this year, including the odd daynote, my end of the year roundup post (see here for previous ones) and my December newsletter (which will be the first one with the new name and look).
Onward!