Daynote - Fri 19 Sep
Back to the woods...
Good morning and happy Friday! I am finally starting to feel semi-normal again, I've fixed all of my various alarms and reminders and got back to my usual sleep schedule, which meant I finally got out for a walk this morning. I was rewarded with an oddly balmy but very autumnal walk, where I saw three deer, got snuffled by Poppy the Labrador and breathed some very fresh air. Lovely.
ON DECK: An excellent 1,660 words this morning, so I'm definitely getting back in the groove. I've extended out my Pacemaker plan to the end of February because the missed weeks in late August and September were making the old plan a bit unworkable. That plan may well go by the wayside depending on several factors, including incoming edits on two projects and pitching for future projects, but for now that's what I'll be plugging away on.
Later today I've got an interview with a journalist, which is very exciting!
LISTENING: I enjoyed this interview with Sebastian Faulks over on the excellent Writer's Routine podcast.
WATCHING: We watched episode 7 of ALIEN: EARTH last night and it was a banger - after a somewhat uneven first few episodes I think this is my favourite recent ALIEN franchise thing of recent years. And I quite liked ROMULUS.
READING: I finished NO ONE TO HOLD THE DISTANT DEAD by K.L. Schroeder yesterday evening and it was phenomenal. Here's the blurb I sent over to Psychopomp:
No One To Hold The Distant Dead is a searing, intensely evocative novella. KL Schroeder paints a gentle, otherworldly apocalypse, both ecological and personal, which by turns delights with its stunning prose and devastates with its incisive detail. This is a timely and fascinating novella that is richly populated with fascinating characters surviving in an all-too-real future. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Check Psychopomp's website if you'd like to sign up to be notified when this superb novella is released. You won't regret it.
After that I started on a proof of Tom Hindle's next Golden Age mystery A KILLER IN PARADISE and inhaled five chapters before bed. The setup is exquisite.
LINK: I've just added a press kit page to the website, as the number of folk asking me for bios and cover images and so on has, uh, gone up in the last couple of weeks. Check it out for my current set of images, cover assets and text that's all free to use.
UP NEXT: The weekend mostly spent with family, then a busy week next week as we drift towards the end of the month, including a bit of day job travel and (perhaps) a podcast recording I'm quite excited about. We shall see. I'll also be doing my absolute level best to get back into a nice regular writing cadence.
Onward!