Daynote - Fri 17 Oct

A really lovely evening in Edinburgh last night, speaking with Gareth Brown about his second novel THE SOCIETY OF UNKNOWABLE OBJECTS, which I've been reading over the past week or so. It was a great turnout and a really lovely evening sitting below the lit-up Edinburgh Castle and talking about magic, writing, travel and much more. Some great questions from the audience too. Thank you to everyone who came along, to Gareth for asking me to chair the session and the wonderful Matthew at Waterstones for organising.

I did get home fairly late after a very nice meal with Gareth, his wife May and their friend Graeme, so I didn't get out for a walk this morning. It's been a total bust this week for woodland wanderings. Back to the woods next week I suppose, or possibly over the weekend.

ON DECK: A cheeky 410 words this morning in a shorter-than-usual session, but you've got to take every sliver of time you can find on weeks like this, when I've been handling copyedits, marketing stuff and responding to Very Exciting Emails.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I am, however, very behind on my overall plan for DRIFT. In times gone past, this would have been cause for panic, self-doubt, frustration and probably a fair amount of beating myself up for 'failing'. These days, it mostly merits a shrug, casting an eye across the calendar for the next few months and moving stuff around. One of the cool things about Pacemaker is that it has two main modes, that you can switch between freely over the course of a project. So here, for example, is a static plan for DRIFT, showing my progress against a fixed target.

As you can see, it's not looking good. You can see stuff happening here - an initial bit of fast drafting, then a week of holiday, then more drafting, then me dropping this project entirely to do structural and line edits on SOLITARY AGENTS, picking it up again, dropping it again for SOLITARY AGENTS copyedits and finally picking it up again but making intermittent progress for a host of reasons. The fixed target, ending the draft towards the end of February, is heavily behind. DISASTER.

Thankfully, I can switch to dynamic targeting:

Instant relief - with a bump up in my target of about 300 words a day, I can still hit my planned date. If that feels unlikely or not doable, I can adjust the dates. If I miss a day, or have a particularly good run of days, the dynamic target will go up or down. Dynamic targeting like this really, really shows you how a few extra words each day can really add up.

This project isn't on any particular deadline and it's quite likely I'll have to put it down again and re-plan. But I love that Pacemaker helps me to be realistic about this instead of just feeling like I'm failing all the time.

LISTENING: Very much enjoyed this interview with my pal Annabel Campbell on the British Fantasy Society podcast. It's a really great interview.

WATCHING: Didn't watch anything yesterday evening as I was in town (see above). But this evening I think we'll get caught up with SLOW HORSES.

READING: More of QUANTUM OF MENACE on trains yesterday evening. The concept of, essentially, a cosy mystery that happens to feature Q as the main character is really quite ingenious.

LINK: It's the final day (don't worry, I'll go back to linking interesting things next week) of the October Upcoming Titles promotion at Waterstones - you can get 25% off the SOLITARY AGENTS hardback with the code OCTOBER25, as well as hundreds of other hardback and paperback titles.

UP NEXT: I have a weekend (and following week) coming up with no book stuff planned, which is a very nice and welcome break (especially as November is going to be busy, with three events in the calendar already). So, next week I'm hoping to get back on the routine properly, get out into the woods, sleep a bit better, see friends and family and also get some words down in the mornings.

Onward!