Feeling much better today, which is a relief. Book festivals are exhausting when you're feeling 100%, never mind still recovering from a cold. Phew.
Still no walk, but I'm going to get a lot of steps in Stirling, so not too worried about that. I'm off there this afternoon for an evening event
ON DECK: Picked up pace a little (funny how that happens when you're feeling better) and got 485 words on Project DRIFT. I might actually get a bit done in the hotel tomorrow morning, we'll see. But nice to be speeding up a bit.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: I actually wildly miscalculated how much I'd need to do to finish the draft of DRIFT by the end of November, because I was using Pacemaker for the first time in a while and put my daily word count in, rather than my cumulative word count (you can use either, but it's a setting on the plan), so the calculation assumed I'd deleted 60,000 words. So! In reality I have to hit about 1,100 words a day consistently through to November 30th. Still a big lift and I need to account for a trip in there, but not quite as undoable as I thought. We'll see. I'll do some calculations next week.
LISTENING: I enjoyed this interview with Scott Hawkins (THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR) on No Write Way. His first book has been on my TBR forever because so many people I know raved about it, but after listening to this interview I'm going to bump it up a fair bit.
WATCHING: We watched the first of the new season of SLOW HORSES last night, which was predictably excellent. I was dismayed, however, to realise that this season mashes together the core storylines from two books (JOE COUNTRY and SLOUGH HOUSE). So my smugness at having read JOE COUNTRY before this season started has been dashed. I'll get SLOUGH HOUSE read sharpish on my week off, I think.
READING: Still having an absolute whale of a time with LONDON STATION by David McCloskey (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon). It's so good. I can't even pick many faults with McCloskey's depictions of British class culture - those book tours of the UK have been put to good use.
LINK: Some cracking recommendations on this Movieweb list of spy TV shows that are better than the movies. Having watched most of them, I heartily agree.
UP NEXT: Finishing packing, then I'm off to Stirling for Bloody Scotland! I'll be putting out an issue of The Sitrep tomorrow and The Vector on Saturday (sign up here if you'd like to get these!), though both of those are drafted and just require some last-minute inserts before I send them. Tomorrow I'll be heading to the Bloody Scotland Prize ceremony in the evening and then I've got my event on Saturday afternoon with Paul Warner, CJ Merritt and Paul Burke.
If you're coming along to Bloody Scotland, please do say hello, I'll be hanging about all weekend.
Onward!