Daynote - Wed 8 Jan

A very lovely and frosty morning today. Stopped dead in my tracks by a deer about three metres away in the undergrowth, breath backlit by the rising sun. I deliberately don't take my smartphone with me on my morning walks, but I do sometimes think about getting a 'proper' camera, so I can stand a chance of capturing moments like this.

But then sometimes it's nice just to have the memory of it.

This morning I also woke up to my latest podcast episode dropping into my feeds. Episode 46 of Write Now With Scrivener is out now, where I'm interviewed by Kirk McElhearn.

ON DECK: A good session this morning, with 1,409 words and a scene and a half completed. I'm starting to get rolling with the characters again, finding my way back into familiar scenes and voices. It's really nice, but I've also got new people to think about and figure out from scratch. So it's not just retreading old ground.

It was one of those mornings where the timer I set at the start of my writing session went off and it felt like I'd blinked and missed the previous 90 minutes. But I also screwed up a find/replace, so fixing that took a bunch of time.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts (between travel, working from home as a designer during the day and evening walking - I don't take my phone with me in the mornings) so this is an unsolicited endorsement for the app I've used for years, which is Overcast. It's made by the developer Marco Arment, who was also the original developer of another app I used for years, Instapaper (I use Pocket now, primarily because it syncs with my Kobo) and it really reflects his amazing attention to detail and strong opinions about effective user experience.

It has three indispensable features for me - smart playlists, smart speed and history. Smart playlists let me build standalone playlists that exclude or include specific podcasts (because when I find a new podcast, I often want to binge the backlist of episodes, but without having 100+ episodes cluttering up my main feed). Smart speed seamlessly snips out long gaps in podcasts (like a three second awkward pause over Zoom), which can save an inordinate amount of time in aggregate (653 hours according to my settings screen) - pretty cool if you're a heavy podcast listener. And the new history and listener stats feature is amazing (though requires a subscription) since I can quickly look back and see what I listened to over the last few days - this is very handy when you write a near-daily blog post that often includes links to podcast episodes!

Heartily recommended - if you're on iOS I firmly believe it's the best podcast player out there.

LISTENING: I absolutely loved this episode of Always Takes Notes with the literary agent and former editor Clare Alexander. Some of the war stories from the pre-conglomerate days of British publishing are both fascinating and jaw-dropping.

WATCHING: We started on Season 2 of THE RIG last night on Amazon. I admit I'm slightly surprised there even is a second season, given the first one ended with (spoilers) a giant tsunami sweeping the North Sea, but the first episode delivered the same sense of creeping weirdness as the first season. Though of course, because the mystery is at least partially explained, the threat is more immediate and there's less in the way of red herrings.

READING: I'm continuing with my beta read for MK Hardy and continuing to have a whale of a time with it. I've generally been pretty bad for multi-tasking several books at a time, with the result that I make glacial progress on all of them, but in 2025 I've decided to try and do one book at a time, so hopefully this section of my daynotes will both change more frequently and be a bit more consistent.

LINK: I really enjoyed Ed Crocker's (LIGHTFALL) interview with SFFAddicts over on Youtube. Ed and I share an agent, so it's super exciting to see him getting to do all the pre-publication stuff and talk about his book and his journey to writing it. And SFFAddicts is an excellent podcast and Youtube channel.

UP NEXT: Surprise surprise, more PROJECT SCARLET. I told you this bit was going to get monotonous, didn't I?

Onward!