Daynote - Mon 5 Jan

Apparently in the festive break I developed the ability to silence my alarm without even waking up, so I did not start my new working year with a bracing walk through the woods and down to the water. Instead I woke, swore and got up an hour late. Hopefully not a portent of the year to come.

ON DECK: On the plus side, I started off solid with 1,105 words on Project VAULT this morning, editing some of what I did just before the end of last year and writing most of a new scene. It feels very good to be filling in little green cells in a brand new spreadsheet.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: Speaking of spreadsheets, I got an email from Pacemaker over the break about a new feature they've added. It's premium only, but it allows you to add specific days to a global calendar where your availability is restricted (like all-day events, holidays or day job stuff). Then you don't need to manually account for that across all of your plans - it just automatically recalculates for you. This is pretty amazing, because keeping that stuff up to date was a major reason I didn't bother with premium before. It's very cool to see them adding new features like this.

LISTENING: I really enjoyed this crossover episode of In My Good Books and Quick Book Reviews - some excellent picks on their 2026 lists.

WATCHING: I watched a tonne of great stuff over the break (see my last newsletter for a partial list) but the best thing I watched yesterday was this excellent interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky, on the How I Write Youtube channel:

Click-baity titles aside, I really love this channel for the depth and exploration of the interviews - this is a really crunchy, craft-focused interview and I really enjoyed it. Also available as a podcast if you don't do video.

READING: I finished off THE POWER OF THE DOG over the break and absolutely loved it. I'm going to give it a month or two before I tackle the sequels though. For now I'm returning to A SPY IN THE BLOOD by Paul Warner, which comes out at the end of the month. It's starting to take off in very interesting ways.

KIT: Over the festive break I finally got annoyed enough with the terrible WiFi in my office (provided by a patched-together arrangement of powerline adapters, Ethernet cables and repeater nodes) that I stumped up for an actual wifi mesh system. I chose the TP-Link Deco S4 system, which comes with three nodes. So far, so good, although resetting my ISP provided router in order to update the SSID managed to brick my router for about 18 hours until they remotely patched it. But now I have a solid 120Mb in my office, which is about double what I had before (it's 400-500Mb elsewhere in the house, but previously I was lucky if I got 40-60Mb in my office and it dropped out constantly).

I might get another 3-pack of nodes, but to be honest this is such a dramatic improvement already I'm not sure I need to. Recommended.

LINK: This may come as no surprise to you, dear reader of a weirdo who blogs most days like it's 2006, but I really liked this extended case for 'blogging in the ruins' from Joan Westenberg.

UP NEXT: More words! And, very excitingly - this week is my first ever week working part-time in my entire adult life. Aside from summer jobs at university and my time in the Army Reserves, I've been a full-time employed adult since I was 23, with only very short breaks in between jobs. So I'm extremely excited to see what it's like and what it might enable me to do. Blog posts on how I decided to make this change and what my new weekly routine looks like are a-brewing.

Right, let's get this year on the road - onward!