Good morning! I attempted to return to my daily routine this morning and, in so doing, realised I've been Quite Ill. I got through my usual walking route and got a decent amount of writing work done this morning, but wow it took it out of me. Still, feeling better than yesterday. And yesterday I felt better than the day before. I hope I should be mostly okay by early next week, with some Vitamin C megadosing and early nights.
ON DECK: I got 36 pages of copyedits reviewed, hitting 74/380 overall. It's fiddly work, checking a lot of punctuation changes and minor rephrasings. Apparently I have literally zero idea how to properly hyphenate things, which is why I'm glad I've got a copyeditor. I suspect I'll make a lot more progress on this edit tomorrow. It's one of those jobs that goes faster the longer I do it, because you get into a flow and the pages fly past. Bit hard to do that on a normal working day when I have to stop at 0745hrs on the dot.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: I find it completely baffling that Microsoft Word doesn't select the next change and display it in the middle of the screen, or even at the top. Why is it always right at the bottom? Who is that useful for? If you're reviewing thousands of changes, it's intensely irritating. And there's been a feature request active for it for well over a decade. But I suppose they've got useless AI slurry to add to all their products, rather than, y'know, features people might actually want.
LISTENING: I really enjoyed the 500th episode of Quick Book Reviews this morning, featuring Val McDermid and Prof. Jo Sharp talking about their new book THIS DOOR OF THE SEAS, which is all about the Darien Scheme. I spent some time in the bar at the Fife Arms last Friday night listening (prepare for name drop) to Val and Jo talking about this book, so it was good to get a more detailed reprise today when I'm not quite so sleepy and ill.
WATCHING: I had a Narrative Damage episode to record last night for City of Whispers, our new Blades in The Dark campaign (check link below for the first episode!) so we didn't watch any telly, but we did watch this video of some Swedish bakers doing their thing.
READING: A single chapter of LONDON STATION by David McCloskey (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) over lunch. It comes out this month! Man, I am so behind with my reading.
LINK: Our new Narrative Damage campaign goes live later today. Here's the trailer - check back later in the day to watch the first episode.
UP NEXT: I've got a Writing Day tomorrow, though I'm also getting ready to go on holiday and hopefully catching up with a friend. But doing copyedits is the kind of writing work that fits in well with that kind of day, so I'm hopeful I'll make good progress tomorrow. Might even finish them. We'll see.
Onward!