Daynote - Tue 15 Apr
Another thousand down.
Still raining and I got up late this morning, so no walk. But lots of cutting words.
ON DECK: Another excellent day chopping words on PROJECT SCARLET, with -1,1316 removed, taking me under 110k, my third milestone on the way to 100k. Just two more to go and I'll be on target, and I have less than 10,000 words to cut. I'm also getting into much rougher draft material, with longer, more rambling chapters. That gives me a lot more opportunities for cuts, so it is paradoxically getting easier to cut a lot of words per chapter the closer I get to my goal. Which is nice.
LISTENING: Loved this episode of the Le Carré Cast with Nick Harkaway on his new novel SLEEPER BEACH - I've had TITANIUM NOIR (first in this series) on my shelf for ages and this interview has bumped it up a few spots on the TBR.
WATCHING: We watched KNEECAP last night on Prime, about the Irish hip-hop trio. A fantastic film that's all the more remarkable for the three group members playing themselves and being excellent actors as well as musicians. It's also hilarious.
READING: More PROJECT SCARLET yesterday. Only just keeping ahead of the editing train.
LINK: There's a Goodreads Giveaway going on for my friend Nick Binge's new novella, EXTREMITY, from Tor US. It comes out in September, but there's 50 print arcs up for grabs!
UP NEXT: Rumbling ever-onward with this edit. About 40,000 words left to work through, I think. I've got through this word count edit faster than anticipated, which is great because it will give me a nice clean and well-shaped manuscript to do my timeline and continuity edit on. I always wonder whether to fix all that stuff first, then cut word count, but to me it seems a bit like wasted effort to carefully reconcile all your dates and times and places if you're then going to cut 250 words in every 1000 (and likely introduce new inconsistencies in the process). So I'm doing it this way around.
Onward!