Daynote - Tue 25 Feb
The last Tuesday in February.
Lovely onshore breeze this morning at the beach, with a lone kitesurfer scudding across the water and catching quite significant air at several points. It looks like a lot of fun.
Where's this year going? It's nearly bloody March.
ON DECK: A sold morning today with 1,637 words - I'm back into scenes that I'm enjoying writing, though cutting rapidly between POVs as I begin to position all those pieces for the last 15,000 words or so. It feels good to be nearing the end.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: Pro-tip for writers who are doing travel-heavy scenes. The two tools I use for research the most are Rome2Rio (which is the best 'what are the options for getting from A to B and how long do they take' search engine I've found) and the indispensable Seat61.com, which is an incredibly comprehensive website covering basically every non-air mode of transport in Europe, to hundreds of destinations. Want to know what the inside of a train station in Spain looks like? Or the colour of standard-class seats on the Vienna to Amsterdam day route? This website has you covered.
LISTENING: Along with most of the writers on the internet yesterday, I was writing/working to this eight hour long 'Severance' collaboration between Apple TV and ODESZA - 'Music To Refine To':
WATCHING: We finished off THE DIPLOMAT last night, which had an absolute belter of a final episode. A series of absolutely compelling scenes between Keri Russell and Allison Janney (as the US Ambassador to the UK and the Vice President respectively) along with the best end-of-season cliffhanger I've seen in some time.
READING: I'm in the last hundred pages or so of THE TYRANNY OF FAITH and absolutely loving it.
LINK: Very much enjoyed this HUDS + GUIS breakdown of some of the fictional UI in ALIEN: ROMULUS. As I've noted before, this blog is a very cool crossover between my dayjob (UX designer) and my creative work and I love their work.
UP NEXT: Gently churning forward towards the end of this draft. I don't think I'll finish this week without some Herculean effort, but I strongly suspect I'll finish it next week. Always nice to hit THE END on anything, but especially a first draft.
Onward!