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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.

Published by David Goodman in Daynote Share

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.

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