Daynote - Thu 6 Feb

I finally got back out to the woods for a walk this morning, after well more than a week. It also coincided with an absolutely beautiful clear, frosty, sunny morning. One of those days that makes you glad to be alive and breathing in cold air. I saw a couple of deer and had a very pleasant, restorative walk.

Because I'm trying to both write consistently and get enough sleep consistently, the morning walk has been the thing that has fallen by the wayside the most this year (if I got to bed a bit late, if it's raining, or if I need a double-length writing session for some reason). But it's wild how much of a different it makes to my mood when I do manage it regularly.

ON DECK: A really solid 1,791 words this morning, involving sinister interrogations and people piecing things together. A lot of fun. But I'm feeling a bit like Gromit in that scene where he's laying track right in front of the train that he's riding, in that I keep just adding stuff in time to write the scene. Also I accidentally jumped ahead yesterday and combined three planned scenes into one. That felt a bit neat when I read it back this morning, so I double checked my longer outline and realised I'd skipped a bunch of stuff, which was going to mess up the pacing and interplay between scenes later.

Thankfully the scene divided neatly in half, but I've also realised that a bunch of things I'd planned to reveal at this stage will work much better if I just... don't reveal them yet. So that will save me some word count I can use to play with reader's expectations later. Muhahaha.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I can't remember if I've posted this before, but I had cause to use this software again recently and I was reminded of how good it was. If you ever have to edit an audio file, there's tons of really expensive software out there to do it, as well as really good and capable open source software. But a lot of it feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - most of the very limited audio editing I do is snipping silences or mistakes out of speech recordings, or grabbing a specific sound or clip from video. And I really like Fission from Rogue Amoeba for this kind of quick editing. It's fast and simple and easy to understand. I really recommend it.

LISTENING: I really enjoyed this episode of the Le Carré Cast with Ben H. Winters, about reading all of Le Carré's in order.

WATCHING: I really enjoy Kirsten Dirksen's videos on Youtube about unusual homes and living arrangements, and this video about a rebuilt lake house in Idaho shaped liked a pirate ship is fantastic. It looks like a real passion project for the woman who rescued it from dereliction.

READING: I am thundering through Eve Smith's THE CURE now, as the plot threads begin to coalesce and the central mystery is revealing itself. Great stuff.

LINK: I'm a huge fan of the writer and maker-of-books Craig Mod who writes newsletters and books about walking, jazz cafes and his life in Japan. And this essay about the sixth year of the membership program he uses to fund his work and how he built it is as good as the five previous instalments.

UP NEXT: I'm frantically laying track in front of myself (and may take an hour or two over the weekend to do that a bit more systematically) but PROJECT SCARLET is proceeding at an excellent pace.

I'm now back in the position I was before I shortened my first draft deadline by a month. At that point I was about 5,000 words ahead of target, but shortening my deadline to mid-March put me 300 words behind target. I've now caught up and overtaken again, so I'm currently just under 4,000 words ahead. I'm hoping I'll hit 5k ahead next week and get to the end of my first draft a few days early. But so far it's all coming together pretty nicely and I'm really enjoying myself.

Onward!