Daynote - Wed 5 Mar
Crossing 100k on the draft.
A grey and dreich morning, windy and fresh. But it's warming up a little bit today, so I only wore my hat for the windy bit at the beach. Flash the Dog had a very good stick to show me.
ON DECK: Really revving up and heading into that final bit of the draft today, now I have a complete outline. I got 2,039 words and just nudged over the 100k mark for the book as a whole. Hooray! That's a slight problem as 90-100k is my target length for the book and I've still got quite a few scenes left to right, but thankfully I've got form for removing a lot in edits, so I shall forge ahead.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: As above, I'm about to embark on my first edit of PROJECT SCARLET, since I'm perhaps a week away from finishing the first draft. For the first time I'll be using my Supernote Manta to do this, marking up an ePub draft of the book with an e-ink stylus, using the Digest feature to build myself a list of changes to make. I'm really looking forward to trying it out, since it's a logical development from my previous process using a Kobo e-reader for the same process.
At the same time, I'll be doing a final round of edits on PROJECT SHARD (reading/marking up in the evenings and lunchbreak and working on SHARD edits in the mornings, to give myself a kind-of break from the SCARLET draft), which I'm hoping will be my regular workflow after this book. I'll definitely report back on how this goes. I have high hopes.
LISTENING: A second reminder that my episode of The Conversation with Nadine Matheson came out yesterday. Check it out for nearly an hour and a half of my blathering. Here's a snippet:
WATCHING: A bit more ANDOR last night. It continues to be a really rewarding re-watch. So many details I missed on the first viewing.
READING: A couple more chapters of GOGMAGOG yesterday, which continues to be beautifully weird.
LINK: I really enjoyed this interview with the wildlife cameraman and presenter Gordon Buchanan. I'm also a super-recogniser (I've passed a test and everything) so that was a cool thing to find out in the opening paragraphs. I wish I could remember names half as well as I can remember faces.
UP NEXT: Charging ahead with the final twenty or so scenes in PROJECT SCARLET. The average length of a scene is dropping precipitously as I approach the end (from 800 - 1500 words on average to more like 500-750), so those scenes are going past quickly, but there's still a lot of them to write.
Still, the end is in sight. Onward!