Daynote - Thu 14 Aug

It's a humid and thundery morning here in East Central Scotland. Feels cooler than yesterday so far though. No walk, because I got up a bit late after a late night working on fiddly edits. A rare evening bit of writing.

Also, a very happy publication day to my friend and fellow Bloody Scotland Debut Prize nominee Claire Wilson, whose excellent crime thriller FIVE BY FIVE comes out today in a gorgeous paperback.

ON DECK: No word count today because it was all fiddly line changes. For complicated reasons yesterday I went through and re-numbered all of my chapters manually in Word, then had to revert a bunch of formatting changes one by one because Word is terrible. Then this morning it was clicking 'Accept' several dozen times.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I got that renumbering done last night, so this morning was what I call the 'easy accepts' pass of the manuscript, where I scan through and say yes to all the individual line edits I agree with. In a marked-up manuscript there's usually a combination of straight additions/deletions/corrections, questions from my editor, nice comments and meatier requests to rewrite or rework sections of the draft.

So in the 'easy accepts' pass, I go through and resolve all the simple stuff (as well as acknowledging and closing the nice comments from my editor, which are always lovely to read through). This gives me a cleaner list of things that require a bit more work, which I can then work through systematically.

I got about halfway through this pass today - turns out novels are really long?

LISTENING: Really enjoyed this episode of Drafting Notes about learning to work with feedback. Great discussion from the guys as usual. That's the Youtube link, but you can also get these episodes on the main Page One podcast feed or through their Patreon.

WATCHING: A bit of a double bill last night - we watched another episode of THE ASSASSIN and it was great, plus the end-of-episode twist was a belter. Then I watched K-POP DEMON HUNTERS which was a fantastic bit of animation. I'm sure I missed a million k-pop specific in-jokes but it's a really well-made, funny and well-written piece of work.

READING: More BERLIN WOLVES yesterday. Still bloody excellent.

LINK: Intrigued by this review of ALIEN: EARTH, which I've had mixed feelings about since seeing the early trailers. I love the ALIEN franchise but at its worst (PROMETHEUS, COVENANT) it's really not great. I've seen a few folk say they absolutely loved this and a few others tear it apart, so I'll go in cautiously.

UP NEXT: More working through the easy accepts later today I think, then I'll hopefully get into the main line edits tomorrow. I might have a longer return train journey on Saturday in which I'll bash out some more edits too, but I'm waiting for confirmation on that. We'll see. But I'm hoping to go into next week with most of the smaller edits taken care of and a nice clear week ahead of me to work on the bigger stuff.

Onward!