Daynote - Fri 22 May 2026
A very verdant Friday. With some editing.
An extremely warm and humid (for Scotland, in May) morning today and the woods were absolutely bursting with greenery. We've had a few days of alternating sunshine and rain and the trees and plants are clearly absolutely loving it.
I also saw four deer in the woods, which is always nice, and what I initially thought was a pure white heron at the beach, which I've never seen before. It might have been an egret though, according to family. Either way it feels like an omen. Hopefully a good one.
Yesterday I also saw that this year's McDermid Debut Award shortlist has been released! I won the award last year, so seeing this year's shortlist really took me back to the incredible excitement of that time.
It's a really great and varied shortlist this year too. I'm very pleased to see Remi Kone (who I did my first ever panel with at Capital Crime) and Rebecca Philipson (who I met at Harrogate last year) on the list as well. Good luck to all of them!
ON DECK: My deadline on Project VAULT is a week today, so today is going to be a BIG editing day. I'm three scenes into part four of five, so I'm reasonably confident of making good progress today, though I'm going to have to properly knuckle down and get through the pages. It's mostly short, fast-moving scenes at this point in the book, but with a lot of POV and timeline reorganisation. We'll see how it goes!
LISTENING: An excellent episode of the Bloody Scotland podcast this week, featuring Vaseem Khan and Sinéad Nolan. My only complaint about this podcast is that I wish it ran year-round, because the format and interviews are so good. Speaking of Bloody Scotland, looks like SA Cosby is going to be one of the headliners this year, which I'm really looking forward to.
WATCHING: We really enjoyed the final of RACE ACROSS THE WORLD last night. What a show. Honestly one of my favourite things on TV. No spoilers but it was a very well-deserved win. The strength, meanwhile, of this show is that you want everyone to win. Looking forward to watching the reunion/behind-the-scenes episode to finish it off. Incredible TV.
READING: Roaring into the last third of SLOW GODS by Claire North (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) and having a terrific time.
KIT: I'm going to be posting lots of boring-but-necessary car stuff, thanks to getting my first car in my mid-forties. First off is this rather excellent MagSafe phone mount from UGREEN.
I tested this out last night and it's absolutely rock-solid. One of the annoying things about cheap phone mounts is that they rattle or fall off the window or otherwise don't, y'know, hold your phone very well. This one does the job very well if you're an iPhone user. Recommended.
LINK: An excellent piece from the Honest Editor on why and how publication dates can move. From the author point of view this can feel quite arbitrary and jarring, so it's good to know some of the rationales that may be at play.
UP NEXT: Editing, editing, editing. After looming for weeks, my deadline is now very much upon me, so the faffing must cease and the editing must happen. Then, a nice bank holiday weekend, hurrah. Might drive somewhere in my car. Which is exceptionally exciting.
Onward!