Daynote - Thu 11 Dec

Early start for work this morning, so I skipped my walk (still recovering from walking 21k steps in London with two bags, to be honest) and cracked on with the outline.

ON DECK: Some exciting emails again yesterday, so this morning I split my working session, spending some time working on the outline (including the very important job of coming up the Part names for the book, i.e. Part 1 - Hocus Pocus) and a bit of time setting up new Pacemaker plans for this book. Very exciting groundwork and I'm getting closer and closer to actually starting the story.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: Speaking of Pacemaker, I stumped up for a premium account finally after seeing some of the amazing screenshots L.R. Lam posted in Edinburgh SFF of their calendar and timelines. At the moment, I manage my across-the-year planning with a mixture of spreadsheets, a Notion timeline I always forget to update, my calendar and individual Pacemaker plans for specifically estimating how long a draft is going to take me.

Hopefully, the Premium version of Pacemaker will give me the tools to manage all of these things - I'll be able to start up projects with multiple plans for each stage of work (drafting, editing, proofs), see everything on one big, combined calendar and track progress. I'm definitely now at the stage where I really need to avoid drastic clashes or logjams of work that I'm doing with different groups of people, so I'm pretty excited about consolidating everything into one tool.

LISTENING: I really enjoyed this episode of Always Take Notes with the novelist Michelle Paver - the discussion about her research process was fascinating.

WATCHING: Watched a bit of LONG WAY HOME yesterday, which is, yes, rich guys on motorbikes, but is also incidentally a pretty good travel documentary and has some incredible cinematography and landscapes. And I quite enjoy the behind the scenes stuff showing how the programme gets made.

READING: More of my friend's near-future novel last night. Terrific stuff.

LINK: A couple of links for you today - really chuffed to see my friend Cat (CL) Hellisen was included in Audible's Best SFF of 2025 list for their excellent book THE SHAPE OF MONSTERS.

And I was also very proud to see my friend Nick Binge's novel DISSOLUTION included in this New York Times list of the best thrillers of the year.

Congratulations to both of them!

UP NEXT: I've got my Pacemaker plan sorted, my outline is nearly there and I'm just about ready to get going, so next week is going to be a last burst of drafting for the year I think. I'm really looking forward to it.

Onward!