Daynote - Mon 19 Jan

A hazy, frosty morning today, which made for a very pleasant walk through the woods and down to the water. Deer huffing clouds of steam in the fields, a newborn calf lolloping around and mist over the water turning Edinburgh into a pink and blue shadow on the horizon. Lovely.

ON DECK: A solid 1,242 this morning and another scene in the bag on Project VAULT, including a fun little mini-cliffhanger. I didn't manage to get any outlining done on Friday though, so I'm edging towards running out of micro-outlined chapters. I may need to break for a day or two to sort that out.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: Another thing I need to consider is my critique partners. I'm a member of an intensive critique group that meets weekly and I'm about to start feeding Project VAULT through the group. But I wouldn't inflict my absolute first draft on my crit partners, so I need to edit at least the first 10,000 words and prep them to run through the group over the next couple of weeks (we have a rough limit of 5k words per person, per week).

So I think I will possibly pause tomorrow, edit the first 10k, then micro-outline a half dozen more chapters. Or maybe split my session tomorrow into drafting to my minimum target, then editing my first 10k, then do the outlining on Friday. I'll need to work out if the chapters I already have outlined will last me until then.

Ah, the ever present juggling of a live project. Fun stuff.

LISTENING: I enjoyed this Quick Book Reviews crossover episode with the (also excellent) Read and Buried podcast host Frankie, for the 50th anniversary of Agatha Christie's death. A really fascinating discussion of her life and work.

WATCHING: We watched the Guillermo Del Toro adaptation of FRANKENSTEIN yesterday and I quite enjoyed it. I saw a lot of criticism when it came out of the glossy, unreal visual look (shades of the hyper-crisp look of the HD cameras on the Hobbit films) and a messy, overlong script, but I thought it was a pretty consistent bit of Del Toro's filmmaking to be honest. And Jacob Elordi did a great job as The Creature, especially in the physicality of the early scenes.

READING: More of EXCESSION over the weekend. God, it's so good. I'm reading it for an episode of The Binge Reading Bookclub, whose central conceit is that each episode talks about one primary aspect of a book that makes it exceptional. For EXCESSION I'm planning to talk about the paratextual nature and sheer narrative invention of the book, which is astonishing in any year but absolutely wild for a book that was written thirty years ago (in other news, 1996 was thirty years ago, yikes).

LINK: Phoebe at The Honest Editor continues to be an extremely reliable provider of excellent publishing links, this time with an interview with editor-turned-agent Kimberley Atkins.

UP NEXT: Not sure! Drafting and editing tomorrow and once I've taken a look at Scrivener and eyeballed how many outlined scenes I have, possibly a bit of outlining too. But definitely some outlining on Friday.

Other than that, a quiet January week lies ahead. Onward!