Daynote - Thu 5 Dec

An excellent start to today, waking up to find that Deadly Pleasures Online Mystery Magazine has named A RELUCTANT SPY as one of their three best spy novels for 2024! What a nice thing to find in my Google alerts.

Excellent walk in the woods today, windy and cool but not freezing. A solitary deer bounding away through the trees.

ON DECK: I had a fantastic writing session this morning (for reasons revealed below) which netted me the very pleasing figure of -1,234 words cut. I always like when the number at the end of the session is a pattern like 777 or 1,234. It feels oddly satisfying. That word count was achieved through editing about six chapters and writing a new chapter to split up an over-long original chapter that needed a break in the middle. It felt like a really great morning's work.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: A long time ago, I had a real problem with procrastinating online, as well as a whole set of complexes about my own motivations, willpower and focus. Back then I tried a bunch of process and technical solutions, including apps like SelfControl and Freedom. But I was a hardcore procrastinator annoyed at even the idea of using an app, so I quickly figured out how to get around them and decided the whole category was a bit of a waste of time. Plus some of them were subscription-based, or required fairly horrendous privacy-busting plugins etc.

Recently, a bit older, a bit less hardcore in my procrastination, I've been struggling to focus on my more complex edits. But rather than coming from the deep well of ennui and self-doubt of my twenties, this is more just because I'm busy and tired. So I thought I'd try out a few options. I found Focus ticked all of my boxes - one-time purchase rather than subscription, no syncing/online component and it can block apps as well as websites. I set it up yesterday, then promptly forgot about it until this morning when my first attempt to distract myself from a difficult editing moment resulted in an inspiring quote being displayed instead of the website I'd tried to reach. And, well, the results are as above - two or three times more editing work done this morning than usual.

I'm annoyed by how well this worked.

LISTENING: More Living in the Library this morning.

WATCHING: A rare in-person live experience last night - watching the readers at the Nova Scotia 2 celebration. This is the anthology that I'm in and it was great to meet some of the other authors and collect a few signatures for my own copy.

READING: Two train journeys last night meant I roared through the middle section of JUSTICE OF KINGS. It's really bloody good.

LINK: This will be of use to perhaps 0.1% of readers, but it's been annoying me for months so maybe it will help you, if you use iCloud tabs on your Mac and iPhones - how to fix iCloud tabs not syncing.

UP NEXT: With my newly unlocked superpower of actually doing writing work for all of my available writing time (rather than periodically faffing around on the internet), I will be forging ahead on SHARD tomorrow and perhaps into next week. No word yet on Decisions, so I will carry on with my current plan. But I do suddenly feel, in a way that I didn't a few days ago, that getting these edits done before Christmas is very much achievable.

Onward!