Daynote - Mon 7 Jul

Well now, another week begins. The news reminds me that it's the 20th anniversary of the 7th July bombings in London, where I lived at the time. An image I made in MS Paint and posted to Flickr (because all the phones crashed) is still, by far, the most-viewed image I've ever made.

That image ended up on TV and in newspapers around the world. A friend of mine teaching English in Japan opened her morning paper and saw it. It was an extremely weird moment. Feels like an entirely different life and an entirely different me. I'm glad that version of me got into work early that day. What a long, strange, amazing twenty years it's been since.

ON DECK: Got up a bit of momentum this morning and got 515 words in the outline. I think there's a bunch more notetaking and worldbuilding and thinking I could do, but I'm champing at the bit to start on it now, so I think tomorrow morning I'll micro-outline my first half dozen chapters and make a start. It's been a few weeks since I actually wrote any prose and it's making me itchy.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I'm not a natural worldbuilder - I tend to do a sort of half-arsed attempt to 'define the terms' of a fictional world I want to write a story in, but then I actually figure out the details in the drafting.

This is in stark opposition to my normal outline-focused approach. I still write an outline, but I find the work of creating detailed background documents really tedious and unrewarding. Plus half the time, I come up with something better in the drafting process and the background documents are now useless unless I spend more time updating them. An exception is creating a timeline, but more and more often these days I'll do that at the end rather than the beginning.

This is the first new thing I've written in several years that will involve a lot of worldbuilding in the text, so I'm going to trust my gut and just start writing it, rather than wheelspinning for another few days. We'll see how it goes.

LISTENING: I really enjoyed this episode of the Book Off! Podcast with David McCloskey and Paul Vidich, talking about spy novels and their own current favourites.

WATCHING: We finished off two things this weekend - THE BEAR, which absolutely stuck the landing on its fourth season. The last episode is essentially a one-act play in a single room and absolutely incredible.

By contrast, I feel like THE HANDMAID'S TALE should have ended on its 9th (and very effective) episode. The final episode oscillated between maudlin and muddled, with a lot of loose ends all being neatly tidied up and some really, really clunky dialogue. A kind of unsatisfying end to a series that was at times incredibly intense and effective. Still, I'm glad I watched it.

READING: More of THE POWER OF THE DOG over the weekend, plus I started reading for a blurb - a forthcoming spy novel by a new author that I'm really enjoying.

LINK: I enjoyed this interview with Chris Bridges, one of my fellow shortlistees for the McDermid Debut Award, over on the Harrogate Festivals website. I also loved this interview with Claire Wilson at Scottish Field, who I'm on the shortlist with for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. It's been a lot of fun getting to know other debut writers through the press and media activity we're doing together.

UP NEXT: Some actual drafting this week, I think! I've got a podcast interview lined up mid-week again, and possibly some edits landing at some point, but for now I'm going to put the head down and get some drafting done. If I can get 4-5k and a micro-outline for the first 10k words done I'll be happy.

Onward!