Daynote - Wed 18 Dec

Possibly my last day in town today, we'll see. And once again I was blessed with functional trains. It remains oddly mild and averagely damp and grey for December. I still miss the woods.

ON DECK: Another split session across home and a cafe in town. I got a cheeky -273 words today. A bit less than yesterday, but I got through more scenes and added a couple of paragraphs. But I'm now 5.5k away from my target word count. I suspect as I keep editing my overall word count will bob up and down around the 120k mark and right at the end I might need to do another quick pass to slice out a thousand words or two. We'll see.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I'm appearing on the Write Now With Scrivener podcast in early January, and one of the things I did in that recording was to wax lyrical about how much I love Scrivener's 'Composition Mode', which is the heavily customisable distraction-free UI you can invoke whenever you want to focus. It's called 'Composition Mode', but I find it as useful for editing as I do for drafting, in part because the ability to zoom in on pieces of the text and use highlighting to focus one sentence at a time is very useful for keeping my brain on task. Here's what my screen looks like when I'm editing.

You can change pretty much everything on this screen - line length, font size, background and font colour, highlighting behaviour. Something about this green colour instantly chills out my brain though. I have a near-Pavlovian response to it after years of working with this colour scheme.

LISTENING: I'm nearly caught up to the current episode of 'The Conversation with Nadine Matheson' after binging the backlog. I really enjoyed this episode with Ruth Ware yesterday.

WATCHING: More BLACK DOVES last night. This is one of those shows that suddenly everyone I know is talking about. We also started Season 6 of WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS which just appeared on Disney+. It remains a delight.

READING: More PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW yesterday, along with a bit of HOW TO DO NOTHING when I got home. Both continue to be excellent. I will say this for commuting - I'm getting a lot of reading done.

LINK: As you'll see above, I'm kind of wedded to Scrivener for my writing process, but I am also fascinated by dedicated writing devices. I recently discovered the WriterDeck subreddit, which is full of people cooking up their own homebrewed distraction-free writing devices. While I will almost certainly stick with my Macbook and Scrivener, I love reading about these weird creations.

UP NEXT: Happy to report Decisions Have Been Made, though I can't talk about them yet. So now I'm sharpening my pencils for a big drafting season. Before I get started there's some micro-outlining to do alongside finishing this edit, but I'm aiming to get both of those things done before Christmas and to take some proper time off over the next couple of weeks. It's been a pretty exhausting year, capped off with a full-on couple of weeks in Edinburgh. I can't wait to watch some daft movies and hang out with my family. Oh, and probably sleep a lot.

Onward!