Daynote - Wed 11 Dec

Back into town again today. I'm getting a lot of reading done. Minus one Celsius this morning, so the countryside was rimed with frost on the way into town.

Sidenote - there's a lot of very good photography of central Edinburgh on Unsplash (which is built into Ghost, the CMS I use). It really is a beautiful city. One of the slight downsides of largely working from home is that I'm not in Edinburgh all that often (I used to live ten minutes walk from Princes Street) but that does mean I appreciate it more when I do come into town.

ON DECK: An excellent and exciting email in my inbox yesterday meant I was in a good mood this morning, so I knocked out -488 words across two chapters in just under an hour. The trains are slightly unreliable at the moment, so I've been coming into town a little earlier than strictly necessary and finding a coffee shop to write, edit and read. And do these blog posts.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: The sidenote about Ghost reminded me I haven't really talked about my experience with using it. I finished porting over my archive from the Blot site I was using before about two months back and have been very happily using it since. Blot was great, but I wanted to simplify and consolidate and Ghost does both newsletters and the website. And sending a post out as a newsletter is as simple as selecting an option on the posting screen (as opposed to laboriously copy/pasting the raw markdown into a third party client like I was doing).

My one very minor niggle is that the browser-based editor can't do links or complex content on a mobile. I'd love a native app, but in lieu of that it would be nice to be able to write a post on my phone and do things like add links, which is currently not possible, as far as I can see. Overall though, 10/10, fantastic, affordable CMS with built-in newsletters, intuitive UI, handy stock image widgets and lots of nice themes.

LISTENING: Loved this year's Cortex episode on Yearly Themes. I really love the concept of a yearly theme (as opposed to resolutions or grand project plans for the years) as a way of channeling and directing your energy and enthusiasm. At one point, host Myke said 'a yearly theme can't fail like a resolution can, but it sure can succeed' and wow, if that's not an intriguing and motivating reason to look more into this I don't know what is.

WATCHING: More DUNE PROPHECY last night. The whispering in shadowy corners has graduated to violence and conflict, so it's hotting up considerably. I remain oddly baffled that they decided to set this 10,000 years before DUNE and not, say, a hundred years. It would have made zero difference to the plot and made the complete civilisational stasis for ten millennia a lot easier to swallow.

READING: More HOW TO DO NOTHING yesterday. It's the kind of discursive, citation-based academic writing I can find quite heavy going when I'm tired or grouchy, but the arguments are compellingly made. Although I think I'm going to start measuring books dealing with attention or intentionality or mindfulness by how many pages they go before quoting Henry David Thoreau. This book's Walden Number is 75, fyi.

LINK: I thought this article by Ronan Bennett on the writing process for the new DAY OF THE JACKAL adaptation was really interesting, specifically in how he deepened and broadened the characters and the plot that they traverse.

UP NEXT: More time in town today. Might get some writing in, possibly, depending on how timings and trains line up. But there's always books to read and critique reading to do as well, so we'll see. Speaking of which, I have some to do now.