Daynote - Mon 2 Jun

A new month! How on earth did that happen?

I got out for a lovely walk this morning, and saw a bunch of deer for the first time in a while, as well as hares out in the fields. It was a fine, slightly blustery morning with blue sky and high cloud, and it felt very good to get moving again after a month pushing towards a deadline.

ON DECK: I was outlining and writing pitches this morning, which is where I do most of my staring out of the window and thinking about plot and how to express it concisely. That got me 588 words this morning, which was a core pitch, intro and a bunch of metadata that I put into my pitches that gives the context for what I'm proposing. I'm doing, hopefully, three of these in the next couple of weeks.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: When I'm writing pitches, I do different lengths of work depending on what and who the pitch is for. If I'm writing something up just for myself, it might be very short, basically a placeholder 'stub' of the basic premise and story that I'll develop later. If it's for my agent or editor, it will be some combination of metadata intro (title options, context, characters, series fit/potential), a core pitch and then a synopsis. The length and depth of that synopsis depends on where we are in the process of pitching. Early on, it might be a page or two, at a very high level. Later when we're developing the idea, it might be several thousand words long and written as a narrative 'treatment' style that describes the whole book in quite a lot of detail.

Later on, I may also write a sample, usually the first 10,000 to 20,000 words. But I'm a little while away from doing that on any of these ideas.

LISTENING: I've been listening to a new podcast called 5AM Storytalk by the screenwriter and novelist Cole Haddon. I really enjoyed this episode with John August, whose voice I'm very familiar with from his excellent Scriptnotes podcast. Very cool to hear him being interviewed about his own life and career.

WATCHING: We watched NOSFERATU last night, which I really enjoyed. Some brilliant performances and a lot of really interesting cinematography choices. At points, the intensely formal nature of some of the shots made me think it was kind of horror Wes Anderson, although the tone was, obviously, a lot darker.

READING: More of THE HIROSHIMA MEN, which I'm really enjoying, in the sense of getting a lot out of reading it, because wow it's a bleak episode to contemplate at any length.

LINK: Loved this Honest Editor piece about the importance of hooks in commercial fiction. I've been told several times that the core pitch of A RELUCTANT SPY (man whose identity is used by secret agents ends up on a mission by accident) is quite a 'hooky' and commercial one, and undoubtedly it has really helped me describe it and get it across to potential readers.

UP NEXT: There's a whole bunch of exciting things bubbling away under the surface over the next couple of weeks. Some of these are things I can talk about (Cymera Festival this weekend, Capital Crime next weekend) and some of them aren't, but suffice to say it's about to get very busy.

Onward!