Daynote - Tue 5 Nov

One of those strange non-days, where we all hang suspended between two outcomes. Please vote, Americans. I'm married to one of your number and the future health of your democracy is of more than academic interest to me. People who tell you your vote doesn't matter may or may not have ulterior motives, but they are also wrong, especially in these days of disinformation and anti-democratic sentiment. When electorates are disengaged, angry and divided, that's when individual votes matter more, not less.

ON DECK: Couldn't sleep (see above) so I was up early and got more done than I thought I would. My aggregate word count was 550, but I probably wrote about triple that, while also cutting a bunch. Such is the joy of trying to quantify editing. In any case, the big new scenes are done. So now I'm reworking some existing scenes and trying to slim the whole thing down a ton so I can fit it all into my target word count.

TOOLS: Second day of using Reminders over Things. I have Things 3 keyboard shortcuts hard-coded into my fingertips, so I'm having some teething issues with capturing tasks, but I'm leaning hard on voice capture and so far it's pretty good. The deep system integration (Reminders showing up on my calendar automatically, the persistent notifications) are pretty great.

LISTENING: Listening to Today's Chill this morning.

WATCHING: More AGATHA ALL ALONG last night. It's really good. I think the narrowed scope compared to WANDAVISION is to its benefit, and the core cast is great.

READING: More DEATH IN THE ARCTIC on my lunchbreak and yesterday evening and the murder has occurred. Or at least, the first murder. As I'd hope for from a Golden Age homage like this, I have zero idea who might be the killer. Red herrings flying through the polar skies.

Yesterday I also read this devastating but important blog post from Phil Gyford, talking about the experience of managing end-of-life care for his elderly father. I think many people around my age are trying quite hard not to think about this aspect of our lives (because the world is already on fire and it's just Too Much to consider right now), but the details of Phil's experience hit me like a sledgehammer after watching my own parents going through something similar recently. It's worth a read, if only to start the mental preparation for something nearly everyone will face at some point in their lives.

UP NEXT: Continuing to work through the existential dread, because what else can you do? I'm switching POVs on some scenes, cutting others, reintroducing yet others and trying to get the whole thing to hang together in a coherent fashion. It's times like this that you realise there's an effectively infinite range of ways to achieve any given narrative goal, and half the battle of writing is just picking one and finishing it. So, time to make some choices.