Daynote - Tue 18 Mar

An absolutely stunning morning today - frost on the grass and the trees in the woods, a flawless blue sky overhead, not a breath of wind and the Firth of Forth as flat as a mill pond. One of those mornings that makes you glad to be alive.

Plus I saw two robins, two deer, five hares boxing in the fields and a particularly cheerful looking curlew at the beach.

ON DECK: Continuing work on my PROJECT SHARD edits, adding 1,133 new words. All of the edits I'm making on this are small, but there's a bunch of them in aggregate - cutting together four longer scenes into an intercut scene that goes back and forth, then adding a bunch of one-line references to something earlier in the book. After that, I'll be adding some specific timestamps and timing references.

So it's all small, pernickety things that actually aren't that much typing, but do require a fair bit of scrolling around, consulting timelines, searching for specific passages and so on. But it's Tuesday and I'm more than halfway through my planned edits, so my confidence is increasing that I'll be able to send this off at the end of the week.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: Yesterday I started doing my first edit markup on the Supernote Manta and to be honest it's even better than I imagined. I'd planned to mainly use the Digest feature to take notes as I read, which is a development of my previous editing process using highlights and notes on a Kobo ereader.

But as I worked, I started using annotations (which work on both ePub and PDF) and I realised, with absolute delight, that the Supernote keeps a record of which pages you've made annotations on! I've never liked marking up PDFs with an 'ink' overlay, because in most cases you then need to page carefully through the PDF to find your changes and it's possible to miss some. But on the Supernote, you get a nice grid of pages available from a side menu and you can tap and hold to remove annotations once you've completed them.

When I combine that with Digest notes for the bigger changes, I have the perfect toolset for the way that I edit, all paperless. I'm really, really chuffed. I'll write up a blog post at some point with screenshots demonstrating how it works.

LISTENING: I enjoyed this episode of the Read and Buried Podcast with Jenny Morris, author of AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO MURDER.

WATCHING: A bit more PARADISE last night, and an episode which upped the ante significantly, earning my first out-loud 'what the fuck' of the season. Good stuff.

READING: More GOGMAGOG last night. Superb stuff. Also reading PROJECT SCARLET as above, but that's work, not leisure.

LINK: Really enjoyed this pretty succinct and comprehensive overview of the Fermi Paradox from Professor Brian Cox:

UP NEXT: Another three days in the plan on PROJECT SHARD, while I also read and mark up PROJECT SCARLET on my lunchbreak. All is well (at least in my immediate vicinity), the words are doing what they need to do, and the sun is shining.

Onward!