Daynote - Tue 11 Feb

My average for getting out for walks is dropping like a stone in this busy and wet February. I'm hoping this incessant drizzle eventually buggers off, because I get antsy when I haven't been out for a few days. Depending on how hard it's raining, I will sometimes don a waterproof and go out anyway, but if I'm honest it doesn't take much rain to put me off. Especially when it's been raining for a couple of days and I know the woods will be very muddy.

Still, I got a bunch of words done, so yay?

ON DECK: Great double length session this morning, that got me to 3,109 words. That's my highest count of the year so far, and it's only mid-February. So that bodes well. I'm now working on a series of linked scenes in PROJECT SCARLET that provide the setup for the big ending, building rising tension through to the last part of the book.

These are fun scenes to write, because they involve a lot of characters trying to find things or work things out and failing, then working around those problems to try out other solutions. All of which generates a lot of fun dialogue, interesting little character notes and opportunities for little chapter hooks that will hopefully pull the reader forward through the story. I also breached 71k this morning which puts me firmly in the last bit of the book. There's still a LOT of plot to deliver, but I'm slightly less worried about it than I was a week or so ago.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: No tool recommendations today, but a brief musing on process, prompted by today's longer writing session. I often wonder what my 'natural' productive working time is. I don't mean total working time for the day. If I ever do this full time, I have no doubt that a typical working day will have a bunch of non-writing tasks in it. But I do think there is a useful, sustainable maximum of productive, focused creative work that you can do in one day, over and over and over again.

I know what my daily functional one-time maximum is, and it's about ten hours. But if I draft or edit for ten straight hours, I will be completely useless for 2-3 days afterwards. I've done it on occasion to hit a deadline, but it's not sustainable in any way.

I think my sustainable max is probably 3-4 hours, although my current routine is about half that at 90 minutes per weekday. I could probably reach that sustainable max in my current schedule and with my current commitments outside of writing, but I'd have to essentially drop everything else - exercise, leisure time, reading. And I'd quickly be quite miserable, I think. I've tried, through trial and error, to write in as little as 30 minutes a day and as much as two hours. But I'd be fascinated to see how my writing work would change if I had an extra hour or two each day. Would my average word count go up? Or would the work slow down and expand to fill the time available?

LISTENING: I'm not a Brandon Sanderson reader (I've tried a couple of books and bounced off them for various reasons), but I am fascinated by the impact he's had on the book world, and SFF in particular. This extremely long interview (3+ hours) with Tim Ferris is a fascinating look at his career and the choices he's made. I'm not sure you can generalise from Sanderson to nearly any other writer, because of how specific those decisions and contexts are, but it's functionally a potted history of the entire way that publishing has changed over the past twenty years.

WATCHING: More SAS ROGUE HEROES last night and boy howdy does Season 2 have a darker overall tone than the first season. It's excellent though. A couple of episodes left.

READING: I've returned to HOW TO DO NOTHING by Jenny Odell the last couple of days, which I'm really enjoying. It continues to be a densely written, allusive piece of work but now that I'm into it that density is becoming very rewarding, which is itself a reflection of the themes of the book. Nearly done with this and I'm going to start working on my TBR stack in earnest. I've got a couple of beta reads hovering on the horizon, but I'm trying to prioritise reading a bit more, so hopefully I'll get through some published books before the next ARC, proof or beta read I pick up.

LINK: I enjoyed this long piece by Matt Gemmell about moving back to the Mac after 8 years working solely with an iPad. I did use an iPad Pro as my mobile writing/computing tool for about three years and it worked pretty well, but I decided to switch to a laptop after writing the first 15,000 words of A RELUCTANT SPY on it and getting pretty bad hand cramps.

UP NEXT: I'm rolling onward with PROJECT SCARLET and prepping for my talk at Arcadia University tomorrow, as well as my day working with the students at Napier on Friday. Really looking forward to both!

Onward!