Daynote - Tue 4 Feb

It was very windy and rainy this morning, so I got made another cup of tea and jumped back in for another hour. Terrific.

ON DECK: A double-length writing session this morning got me to 2,619 words this morning, which felt pretty great. It also got me to the end of the action set piece I've been writing for a couple of days, which proved very exciting to write. Now just a couple more cleanup scenes and I'll be into the next big arc of the novel.

It's going pretty well, but again I'm eyeing that overall word count fairly nervously. It will be fine - I write fairly puffy first drafts with a lot of room for cutting repetition or needless uses of the word 'that'. In any given thousand words, I can usually lose a hundred or so, once I've figured out the shape of the whole story.

So I'd expect my first draft to come in somewhere between 100 and 115k. I'm targeted towards the lower bound of that window, but going over my target most days, so I suspect I'll hit the 100k mark a little early at the current rate and then add the next 10-15k up to my mid-March deadline. Then I'll start editing the whole thing back down, chapter-by-chapter, until I've got something in the ballpark of my original target.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I've started the process of moving my idea files over from Obsidian to my Supernote Manta, largely by rewriting them by hand. I can type into Supernote note files and I'm sure I could move the actual Obsidian files over if I could be bothered, but to be honest it's actually quite a good filtering exercise to re-read all these old ideas and move them over one-by-one. A lot of them are just single paragraphs in any case.

At first I was a bit worried about losing the searchability factor that Obsidian gave me, but I don't think I've ever actually searched my big Obsidian vault full of writing notes - I usually just navigate by filename. And since I can highlight any handwritten text and turn it into a link or heading in the Supernote, I can navigate it just as easily. For the Supernote users out there who might be reading this, the way I'm doing this is by creating a big 'Ideas Inbox' note file, with a handwritten index and a one-page-per-idea structure. Then if I choose to develop an idea further into a project, it gets its own note file in the PARA structure I'm using elsewhere in the Notes folder.

LISTENING: I really enjoyed the latest episode of The Coode Street Podcast, about the books they're looking forward to in 2025. New to me was the 'Cities of the Weft' trilogy by Alex Pheby, which looks delightfully Gormenghast-ish. I think I'll pick up the first one in the series.

WATCHING: We finished Season 1 of SAS ROGUE HEROES last night and really enjoyed it, although the emotional impact of Sofia Boutella's character apparently dying is somewhat muted by her face being prominent in all the thumbnails for Season 2. Still, looking forward to diving into that later this week.

READING: Properly getting going now on Eve Smith's THE CURE and it has thoroughly hooked me. It's a proper speculative page-turner.

LINK: I've been really enjoying my friend Jordan Acosta's new-ish newsletter, 'The Acosta Dispatch', which has another issue coming out soon. A fascinating look at a newly-agented author's process and experience of publishing, as well as some excellently curated book reviews and links. Recommended.

UP NEXT: I'm once again running out of road with my micro-outlining, but I'm off into town this evening to see a friend for dinner, so I'll do a bit on the train to prep for the rest of this week.

After I finish a big set piece there's often a bit of a lag as I mentally reset myself and look back at the outline to figure out how to smoothly decelerate back into the overall plot. The trick is to do that without it feeling like a huge drop in tension that feels to the reader like boredom or a let-down. Thankfully I have some pretty good ideas for how to keep the underlying heartbeat of the story nice and tense.

Onward!