Daynote - Mon 18 Aug
Back into the line edits.
Back to it this morning after a very busy weekend. About six hours of editing on Saturday (deadlines) but a very, very nice farewell lunch on Sunday for a good friend of mine who's moving to Australia in a week. Bittersweet but lovely.
I'm also (hence the stock photo pick above) waiting on some news today. Which I can't talk about. But it's exciting.
Yesterday, the lovely folks at Goldsboro Books also did a really nice spotlight post about A RELUCTANT SPY, which was the launch title for their amazing Crime Collective book subscription.
It's quite something seeing everything that's happened with this book all laid out in one post. And Goldsboro have been absolutely amazing to work with.
ON DECK: Over the weekend I got all of my in-manuscript comments done and line edits accepted, so the manuscript is now completely 'clean' and ready for me to do a front-to-back edit on, doing the 'big picture' edits that need lots of small changes across the whole book. I usually do these as I work my way through the draft, rather than jumping about trying to figure out where to put them.
On Saturday and Sunday, I probably wrote 1,500 words or so, but I then cut more than that, so the net word count was -941. Then this morning I kept going, trimming and polishing and cutting, for an oddly similar (less two hundred words) net count this morning of -741. It's odd how the numbers sometimes echo like that.
LISTENING: I really enjoyed this interview on Confessions Of A Book Collector with Jamie West. Fascinating to hear how he's made self-publishing work for him so well and got shortlisted for a CWG Dagger in the process.
WATCHING: We watched the first two episodes of ALIEN: EARTH over the weekend and really enjoyed it. The first episode is heavy on the visual and script callbacks (in the same was as ALIEN: ROMULUS was) but I kind of love the whole '70's space trucker' aesthetic and vibes of the first movie, so I'm very glad they've been brought back for these new ventures. Plus there's lots of new terrifying alien critters to worry about!
READING: A bunch more of BERLIN WOLVES over the weekend, which continues to be a heartstopper of a book. I've got a long weekend coming up for the bank holiday, so I'm hoping I'll finish it off then.
LINK: I thought this interview with the book review editor for Prima magazine over on The Honest Editor was fascinating. The sheer volumes of books she talks about are a bit mind-boggling though.
UP NEXT: Hopefully, exciting things I can't tell you about will be afoot this week, but we'll see what happens and when. In the meantime I am barrelling forward with the line edit on SOLITARY AGENTS and looking forward to a tiny bit of time off over the upcoming bank holiday weekend. Also, a very nice birthday dinner this week (not mine).
Onward!