Dave Goodman
Daynote - Tue 14th May 2024
One of my friends described this daynotes thing as ‘bold’ the other day, because writing daily or near-daily anything is a lot of work. But I’m aiming to keep these doable in 5-10 minutes (this one took 12, for the record, but has fiddly embeds) and I automate a lot of it with Obsidian and templates. To start a new post, I click a day on the calendar, and the title, date, tags and URL are all generated for me. It’s very quick.
More adventures in Canva yesterday, producing this reel, which attempts to set out the core idea of my book ‘A Reluctant Spy’. Would you take this deal? In the book I make it really quite insidiously tempting to the main character, Jamie Tulloch.
Happily, I also discovered Canva has a native desktop app, which works brilliantly. And I also discovered that Instagram in the browser now lets you upload (pretty sure it didn’t used to do that) so my ongoing quest to eliminate apps that destroy my focus from my phone got another small boost.
I also got name-checked in this Locus magazine review of the Jan/Feb issue of Analog, which featured my story ‘Hull Run’. AC Wise had this to say:
“Hull Run” by David Goodman is another standout piece in the issue, with a strong voice and excellent characters. Four bored teens engage in a dangerous hull run during a Venusian windstorm. When one of them mistimes a jump, the others stage a dangerous rescue to get her back, evoking particularly strong memories for one of the characters who lost her mother as a result of an accident during a routine hull repair. Goodman does a wonderful job of creating characters who feel real, giving the story emotional depth, and conveying genuine tension during the rescue, making for a highly effective story overall.
So that was a lovely thing to have appear in my various feeds.
ON DECK: More new scenes on SHARD this morning, continuing my sewage plant tour (well, cutting it short because of Events, actually) and hopefully getting to one of my interstitial ‘record’ scenes that break up the narrative. Later today, a Very Exciting Call that I’m really looking forward to, since it represents the end of a six or seven week process and the beginning of something much bigger.
UP NEXT: SHARD, SHARD and more SHARD. Maybe an outline for a specific project, if someone asks it of me…
MUSIC: Still bopping my head to the Bicep Essentials playlist.