Daynote - Tue 10 Dec
Back to town again.
Off into town again, this time on a bus courtesy of a cancelled early morning train. Still, I have a bunch of books in my bag. And this post to write!
ON DECK: Really excellent session this morning, cutting -1,005 words. You know, after the last edit of this book I was convinced I’d got it as tight and honed as possible. And yet all of those thousand words were from a single long scene that apparently was nowhere near as lean as it could be.
I’ve now got about 8k words left to cut, and I reckon about 5-6k to add, so I suspect I’ll need to lose an average of 250-500 words per scene to hit a 120k target. But I also won’t need to find too many more ‘puffy’ scenes like the one I worked on this morning to get the total down pretty quickly.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: I'm planning a new project at the moment (well, sort of new, it's got 22k words already) so I've started using Pacemaker to figure out how I'm going to draft it. This is what my plan looks like:
And this is how I figured out I can write a sustainable first draft in the time I have available AND take two weeks off at Christmas. What I like about Pacemaker is that you can fiddle with all sorts of variables (do you want to skip weekends? Do more at weekends? Skip every second Saturday? Only write on Tuesdays and Thursdays?) and it will adjust your graph and show you in real time what the impact will be. And when you're actually writing, you can see if you're ahead or behind your plan, or have the plan itself adjust to the word count and watch your 'required to hit the deadline' daily totals gradually drop (hopefully).
A recent (but slightly less capable) alternative is Trackbear, though I will probably stick with Pacemaker as I've been using it for ages and I have a grandfathered-in free project. Also, Pacemaker has way more toggles and switches to flip.
LISTENING: Really enjoyed this episode of the In Writing podcast with screenwriter Jesse Armstrong (SUCCESSION, PEEP SHOW).
WATCHING: Caught another episode of WOLF HALL last night and we're definitely in the end game - lots of middle-aged men in fur hats roughing each other up in very Tudor ways. Mark Rylance continues to astonish.
READING: Because of the thing I'm doing I had an hour or two of commuting and sitting around waiting that got me through three chapters of THE PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW. As I've said before it's very clear why it's been showered with praise. I am currently waiting for the other shoe to drop, narratively speaking.
LINK: I was very happy to see A RELUCTANT SPY appear in Jeff Popple's detailed roundup of the best debuts of the year. Thank you to Jeff. And congratulations to Jennie Godfrey, who won best debut in the Crime Fiction Lover Awards 2024, which I was also shortlisted for.
UP NEXT: More reading, more editing, more hanging about in central Edinburgh. And after a good call with my agent yesterday, more waiting and hoping that the outcome of various Decisions will be favourable.
Onward!