Daynote - Mon 17 Aug

It did not look or feel like mid-August this morning. 13°C and overcast. It was quite nice, to be honest. A bit cooler is better.

I'm back! After a very lovely two weeks off. I had a lovely day at Fringe By The Sea chatting with Doug Johnstone right at the start of my time off:

It was a really great conversation and inspiring stuff, as a writer a couple of years into his career getting the chance to talk to someone who has been a working novelist for twenty years. I loved it.

We also had a very nice couple of nights away at Glen Spean Camping up near Fort William:

It's a new campsite that's only on its second season, but it was a brilliant place for us to dip a toe back into (very comfortable) camping, with a lovely bell tent we didn't have to set up ourselves. Showers, composting toilets and an incredible view. We absolutely loved it. On the same trip we also visited Fort William itself and Ariundle Nature Reserve, a fragment of Scotland's temperate rainforest.

It was a really lovely trip and I highly recommend both the area in general and the campsite in particular.

ON DECK: While I was off I got two separate sets of edits back from different editors. Thankfully they weren't both novels - one was a novelette, which I managed to get through this morning, as it was only a little under 10,000 words. I then got onto the main edit on PROJECT VAULT, which has also arrived in my inbox and is a lot chunkier, being a full-length novel. Only a chapter done today, but I will get up to speed shortly.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I do enjoy a novel edit with editorial feedback. I used to do a big complicated plan and try and execute structural things first, but these days I prefer to dive straight into the comments on the manuscript itself and work through the whole thing, front-to-back. That way I know I've got a 'clean' manuscript where all the little pernickety things are addressed. Does that mean that some things might subsequently get deleted or amended in bigger edits? Sure. But trying to figure that out takes more time than just working through the edits. So I'll spend the next 2-3 days working through the line edits, then task out my edit letter and work on the heavy lifting. Thankfully, it's a fairly light edit letter.

This is a complete reversal of what I used to do, but it's working a lot better for me. The only thing that remains true over time about my writing process is that it's always changing, in ways big and small.

LISTENING: Cor, I listened to a lot of good podcasts over my break, while doing the housework and driving about. But one that I really enjoyed was this interview with Olivie Blake (best known for THE ATLAS SIX) on the Page One Podcast. It's just a really fun interview.

WATCHING: We finally started on the third season of SILO, which is going heavy on the Big Underlying Conspiracy. I found Season 2 a bit frustrating because it kind of spun its wheels for most of the season and just introduced a whole bunch of unanswered questions, but I'm hoping Season 3 will get a bit more explain-y.

READING: I finished BECOMING A WRITER, STAYING A WRITER by J. Michael Straczynski (Bookshop, Amazon, Waterstones) over the break and greatly enjoyed it. The last third or so (about sustaining a career over the long term) was especially inspiring stuff. It's actually quite rare to find writing books specifically aimed at early/mid-career professional writers (since it's by definition a limited audience) so I was very happy to find this one.

LINK: I was very pleased to see that Paul Burke reviewed SOLITARY AGENTS over on CrimeTime, along with some other fantastic summer spy books.

UP NEXT: It's going to be a good couple of weeks of edits, I reckon, at least. I haven't really got my teeth into them yet, but I'm hoping that the good break I've had from this book will mean that I am able to be quite objective and move through the edits reasonably swiftly. Nothing on the events docket for the rest of August, though I might pop into Edinburgh for a bit of Book Festival stuff over the weekends. We'll see.

Onward!