Daynote - Mon 11 May 2026
Hopping into a new week.
Back to the woods this morning and wow, the undergrowth has really leafed out in the last week or so. This is always an interesting time, because it means the visibility in the woods drops from a hundred metres plus to maybe three or four in any direction. And that means I much more regularly bump into the slightly dozy local deer on the paths.
You can tell these deer aren't regularly hunted, because they have the survival instincts of a potato. I have lost count of the number of times I've come around a bend in the path and been a couple of metres away from them. This morning I also saw a rather large hare in the field, who thought he'd evade my detection by the cunning ruse of lowering his very large ears. I pretended I hadn't seen him and kept walking.
A very nice start to both the day and the week though. Cool, but not cold. Cloudy, but green. Lovely.
ON DECK: My mood was doubtless also lifted by the decent progress I made this morning. Friday was a lot of fiddly timeline edits (and, if I'm honest, a fair amount of procrastination avoiding said fiddly timeline edits) but I still got seven chapters and -655 words cut on Friday. However, this morning I stormed ahead and cut -500 words across eight more chapters! And, thankfully, I'm having the hoped-for experience of reading the draft material and going 'hmm, this isn't actually all that bad'. Which is what you want, at this stage of the game. My end of month deadline remains a challenge, but an achievable one.
LISTENING: Greatly enjoyed this morning's episode of Quick Book Reviews with my fellow Bloody Scotland prize-winner and pal Tariq Ashkanani, talking about his new book THE HOLLOW BOYS, which launches this week. It's a really great interview.
WATCHING: Undemanding viewing over the weekend, mostly BOB'S BURGERS, though I did watch GREENLAND 2: MIGRATION while doing some fiddly admin on Saturday night. Distinctly lower budget than the first film. Some fun post-apocalyptic visuals but a bit 'cosy catastrophe' for my liking. Though I suppose it subverted that trope right at the end.
READING: Closing in on the last fifty pages or so of CHILDREN OF STRIFE by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) and, I'm not sure how, but it just keeps escalating. To the point I have absolutely zero idea how he's going to pull off any sort of ending.
LINK: A second podcast link today, this time for the Capital Crime preview episode of Confessions Of A Book Collector, featuring festival director Lizzie Curle. A great summary of why I enjoy this particular book festival so much. And I was very chuffed that Lizzie highlighted my panel on the Friday morning as one of the things she was looking forward to.
UP NEXT: It's a busy week this week! I've got two podcast recordings, on Wednesday and Friday. And I'm going to two book events in the evenings this week - Frances White talking to Hannah Kaner for THE BONE DOOR on Tuesday and Nick Binge talking to Gareth Brown for ABYSS on Thursday.
And, somewhere in there, I need to cut another couple of thousand words and knock off 15-20 more chapters of Project VAULT.
Onward!