Daynote - Mon 20 Jul

Hello there!

A couple of very-much-needed weeks away from gestures at the internet all of this. I've made some good progress on the work, had a bit of a think about priorities, been to a couple of bookish events, hung out with friends and generally had a reset.

I'm returning to the daynotes, though they may not be quite as drumbeat regular as before. Sometimes I might allow myself to forget to do one. There's nothing quite like a rod you make for your own back. I don't think I'll switch to the more common 'weeknote' format, because there's something I quite like about short, daily posts and I already write a long newsletter each month, so weeknotes would be a weird halfway-house.

Anyway, hi. Hope you've been well.

ON DECK: A solid 740 words today, and I edged over the 50,000 word mark on Project DRIFT. Normally that would be the notional halfway point, but I'm guessing this book is going to be somewhere between 120k and 140k when the first draft is finished, so I'm not quite there yet. However, 50k is still a nice 'yes, this thing definitely has legs' milestone.

LISTENING: I've been listening to the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize interviews on the In My Good Books podcast and they're fantastic, just as they were last year when Susie interviewed me and my fellow shortlister. So far, there's been May Rinaldi for LIAR, THIEF and Frances Crawford for A BAD, BAD PLACE - fantastic stuff and I can't wait to see who wins in September.

WATCHING: Over the last week we absolutely inhaled the final season of THE BEAR. So, so good and an absolutely pitch perfect ending. I've never worked in a kitchen (beyond a couple of terrible shifts in a tourist cafe as a busser, though I have done some other intense, teamwork-based jobs) but I've also never seen a better depiction of a real, slightly (sometimes majorly) dysfunctional group of people trying to do something amazing together. Fantastic stuff.

READING: I've been reading THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) over the past week or two and it is truly fantastic. Just wonderful prose and so compelling. I saw Stephen interviewed (by my friend Erin!) at Cymera this year and bought this book right afterward and it has absolutely lived up to the hype.

LINK: This is a fantastic post over on PubTips about advance size, marketing correlation, and how decisions are made to pivot or change an approach. Well worth reading for anyone interacting with marketing and PR teams.

UP NEXT: A quiet week this week, just getting words down and doing some reading. Once I've finished the above, I'll be moving onto GHOST NOTES by Doug Johnstone, who I'm interviewing at Fringe By The Sea in a couple of week's time.

But, for now, back to the words.

Onward!