Daynote - Tue 25 Mar

Sun and cloud in rapid succession this morning on the morning walk, roasting one minute among the trees and then chilly on the beach. But there were bounding deer, friendly labradors and waves to my fellow morning walkers.

Waterstones Edinburgh West End posted about me coming in to their store on their Instagram stories, so I nicked the image for my own account. You can probably tell how chuffed I am.

ON DECK: Proceeding apace with PROJECT SCARLET, and I cut another -757 this morning, which I'm really happy with. I'm still in the heavily edited sample material that's already had 2-3 revisions, so I expect the cuts to get deeper the further I go.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I decided to do a few sums to work out (as much as I can work out from two days of data) what my editing pace has been. I have largely in the past just made a best guess as to how long an edit will take, then made it work in the time available, but I'd love to have a better sense of how long editing a book actually takes me.

So this morning, I worked out that I've worked through 12,718 words in two days of editing (90 minutes per session). In that time, I've cut 1,372 words. So, very roughly, I'm editing 5,000 to 6,000 words per day and cutting about 10-15%, which is bang on my guesstimate. Now I have 11,364 edited words.

There's 9,768 words left in the first part of the book, so I suspect I'll finish that by Thursday or so, after which I'll need to re-baseline, because I think I'll cut more words per chapter from the first draft material, so I may get through it slightly faster? Or perhaps slower, I don't know. But as a very rough rule of thumb, an editing rate of 5k per day feels like a good assumption I can use for planning edits in the future.

LISTENING: Absolutely loved this episode of The Real Writing Process with my friend Eliza Chan, author of FATHOMFOLK and the forthcoming TIDEBORN. Eliza and I were on submission together back in 2022 and commiserated and celebrated when we both (eventually) sold our first book, so it's very cool to get an insight into how she does the work.

WATCHING: We've been saving up Season 2 of SEVERANCE while we finished some other shows, and finally dived in last night. Quite the series opener. The surreal brightness of the office spaces still really weirds me out. Fantastic production design.

READING: More of my own book - PROJECT SCARLET, where I'm 20-30k words ahead of my editing, but probably need to speed up.

LINK: A fascinating thread about the man vs the myth of Wyatt Earp.

UP NEXT: Told you that this bit was going to get dull. It's going to be 'editing PROJECT SCARLET' for the foreseeable, at least in terms of what I'm up to.

However, today is my friend Nick's US release day for DISSOLUTION, and I'm really looking forward to his UK launch event on Thursday.

Onward!