Daynote - Thu 27 Mar

Another skipped walk this morning, but I will be hotfooting it around Edinburgh later today helping to set up my friend Nick's launch event for his new book DISSOLUTION, so I'll definitely get my steps in.

A few tickets for that event left, so do come along if you're in or near Edinburgh, it's going to be amazing.

ON DECK: Prepping for an announcement later today, but it's embargoed until 12 (it's not a new book, sorry), so I'm just getting my social posts and blog post prepped.

This morning's writing session was a very solid edit session, cutting another -735 words and finally reaching the end of the polished material. From here on out it's all first draft, so the cuts are going to be deep.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: Part of my editing has been realising that, wow, I have a lot of date and time references in this book. When I wrote A RELUCTANT SPY I built a very detailed timeline during the editing process because I needed to make sure everything lined up (flight times, time of day, time differences). And I've reached that point in this book too.

I use an app called Aeon Timeline to do this, and I've finally worked out how to sync all my scenes from Scrivener into Aeon without trashing all the useful metadata in Scrivener.

LISTENING: My friend Nick is doing the rounds of many of the podcasts I listen to (which is odd, given he's one of my critique partners and we speak at least weekly, but now he's in my headphones every day), but I particularly enjoyed his 'Five Books That Influenced Me' appearance on Page One.

WATCHING: I've heard nothing but good things about ADOLESCENCE on Netflix, which sounded like it had incredible performances and was an amazing technical achievement (every episode is a single, continuous shot). But it also sounded extremely harrowing. We started watching it last night and, indeed, it is all of those things.

We're only an episode in, but I'm glad we decided to watch it.

READING: I'm being a bit of a flighty reader at the moment and can't settle on anything. Last night I started SCORPIO, a spinoff of Marko Kloos' FRONTLINE series. It's pretty good so far. If you like military SF, I heartily recommend Marko's work in general and the FRONTLINE series in particular.

LINK: I thought this annotated retrospective of the original dotcom boom and bust was an an absolutely fascinating piece of writing.

UP NEXT: An Announcement later today, then off into town for Nick's event, then a day off filled with appointments tomorrow. Also my first foray into first draft material on PROJECT SCARLET, and very likely some timeline-building over the weekend. Onward!