Daynote - Mon 6 Oct

It's a beautiful, crisp October morning today, but I was at a wedding reception last night (congratulations Andrew and Sarah!) so I opted for the lie-in and missed my walk. But it was lovely to catch up with a load of people I've not seen in ages and see how everyone's getting on.

ON DECK: No writing this morning. Too much of a Monday morning and I got up late. So I opted for finishing off some leftover admin following hand-in of my copyedits this morning instead of, y'know, actually writing. Sometimes you have to pick and choose what you can move forward. This morning the answer was 'emails and a spreadsheet' and not much else.

The weekend was good though - in town for a family visit on Saturday and I stopped by Waterstones West End on the way and signed 16 (!) copies of the paperback. It's really fantastic to see the book being so widely and heavily stocked now. Especially in this particular branch, which I've been visiting since I was a very small boy.

LISTENING: I was reading Phil Gyford's latest weeknote and I saw he mentioned a 'radio station' of some kind called NTS. I'd never heard of it (and nowhere on the website that I can find is it explained what NTS stands for) but I was intrigued enough by his description to find it and it's pretty cool! Two radio station streams, 24 hours a day, from radio stations around the world (70+) plus a load of playlists. All ad-free. And they've got a really nice phone app too.

WATCHING: A bit more MITCHELL AND WEBB last night. I think the Sweary Aussie TV Drama is a bit too '90s sketch show' joke-that-goes-on-too-long but I laughed out loud at this bit, which straight up felt like the setup for a Nicholas Binge novel:

READING: I picked up a copy of THE SOCIETY OF UNKNOWABLE OBJECTS on Saturday, as Gareth Brown (the author and my Fife signing tour buddy back in August) had very kindly asked me to chair his event on the 16th of October at Waterstones West End. I'm loving it and I can't wait to chat to Gareth about it next week.

LINK: A month or so ago I finally ditched my Reddit account (I was spending far too much time on it) but I still occasionally go back to one of the few worthwhile bits, which is the excellent PubTips subreddit. This AMA by a Big 5 marketer is excellent reading for people who are new to traditional publishing or pursuing it, as it breaks down several harmful myths (like the whole 'you should spend a chunk of your advance on ads/PR/influencer boxes' thing that seems to bubble up from time time to time).

UP NEXT: Three days at home, then I'm back to dogsitting in Edinburgh this Friday (welcome back to the blog, River!) for a long weekend, which I'm hoping to use to get caught up on my reading and possibly some audiobooks if River is feeling energetic and we walk a lot. But I hope to make some good progress on PROJECT DRIFT as well. We'll see.

Onward!