Daynote - Mon 2 Mar 2026
On the March to another Monday.
Still off my feet, so no walk this morning. But I've got an appointment to get checked out, so hopefully later this week or next I'll be back out. I'm going a bit stir crazy, it must be said.
On the plus side, my first full working day at home on Friday went very well. I didn't manage absolutely everything on my (quite ambitious) todo list, but it went pretty well, all things considered. A solid bit of draft, edits, outlining, a bunch of annoying admin I've been putting off for ages, plus my newsletter. The day absolutely flew past and I had a great time. So, the goal of figuring out what a regular writing day might look like was definitely achieved.
ON DECK: A solid 1,678 words this morning (actually 1,404 of actual progress, since I cut a couple of hundred words in edits on Friday) which felt really good. The story is reaching a tipping point where it's about to roll headlong into a lot of very jam-packed action sequences, so I'll need to work on more detailed outlining through to the end of the book pretty soon. And I'm still in the 'I've got 40,000 words to deliver 60,000 words of plot' space, which doesn't feel great, but which is only really fixed by just cracking on with it.
LISTENING: I really enjoy Arthur Snell's podcast Behind The Lines, and this emergency episode with Charlie Gammell on the current situation in Iran is well worth a listen. Although it's moving so fast that a fair chunk of the episode is already out of date. Still, worth your time for some pretty solid analysis.
WATCHING: A bit more of DOWN CEMETERY ROAD over the weekend and it has escalated significantly. The substitution of a Cornish fishing village for a supposed village in Scotland was a bit jarring for us specifically, because this particular Cornish fishing village is where we had our honeymoon, so we recognised it instantly. But that's a pretty niche complaint.
READING: I have absolutely flown through OCTAGON by CJ Merritt (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) this weekend.
I'm less than a hundred pages from the end and having a great time. Proper blurb/review tomorrow.
Update - finished at lunchtime, here's my blurb:
CJ Merritt's OCTAGON plunges the reader into a nightmarish nuclear conspiracy that spans the European continent, from the darkest woods of Scandinavia to the Adriatic coast. Short on options, time and resources, the protagonists of this breakneck espionage thriller untangle a web of threats, opportunities and uneasy alliances that left my head spinning. An authentic and compelling spy novel that hooked me from the opening scene.
LINK: In case you missed it last week, my next book SOLITARY AGENTS is now available on NetGalley UK! If you're a blogger, Instagrammer or prolific reviewer with a NetGalley account, you can request a digital proof from my publisher.
UP NEXT: I'm off to an event in Haddington tomorrow, but otherwise it's a pretty quiet week, just rolling gently forward with the draft and hoping to crack 70k or so. We'll see how I get on.
Onward!