Dave Goodman
Daynote - Mon 10th Jun 2024
Roaring back to life today, back on my routine and feeling good about it, after an entire weekend in the garden. On Saturday I cleared one half of our front garden of four-foot tall daisies and yesterday I pressure-washed our patio so it’s no longer coated in algae and weeds. So I’m a little sunburned and tired, but pretty satisfied.
ON DECK: Absolutely smashed through edits this morning, finishing four long-ish scenes and cutting a bunch out of them, for an aggregate word count loss of -1,055. This final third of SHARD has a lot of action scenes and I tend to go on a bit in action scenes. I do consistently get told that my more, uh, kinetic writing is very cinematic and easy to follow, but that’s because people don’t read the first draft where I laboriously describe every single step of every single action that each character takes. I’m basically transcribing a movie in my head and the first version is always too long. So some nice easy cuts.
LISTENING: Listening to The Lounge on Apple Music which is about as generic auditory wallpaper as you can get, but that’s what I need when I’m editing.
READING: Read a bunch more of Hotel Orient this weekend and I expect I’ll finish it today or tomorrow. It’s extremely twisty and keeps surprising me, which is A++ just what you want from a mystery. Excellent stuff.
UP NEXT: Full steam ahead on SHARD this week. If I can finish it by Friday I will be extremely happy because wow do I want to get this book out of my face so I can do literally anything else. I love it, but I’ve been tinkering with it for ages and I’m really quite badly in need of writing something wholly new.