Daynote - Thu 20 Nov

I'm off to Glasgow today for a day in the office followed by an evening event at Ibrox Library (more below), so no walk this morning, aside from up to the station. It's a beautiful morning though, crisp and cold.

ON DECK: I'm on the train, so I'll be working on my outline until I get to Glasgow. Then I'll very likely wander about on my lunchbreak and see if I can find some books to vandalise.

At 6pm I'll be at Ibrox Library, where I'll be talking to Natalie Jayne Clark alongside fellow panelists Neil Broadfoot and Andrew Raymond for the Book Week Scotland crime and thriller panel. I'm really looking forward to it - it's always fun meeting other writers and also, frankly, I love libraries. As I was saying to the librarians in Denny on Saturday, I spent a lot of time in libraries growing up. One of the greatest days of my young life was when I was deemed worthy of an adult reader ticket that let me take out up to twelve books at once. You better believe I made use of that privilege.

LISTENING: An excellent episode of Drafting Notes from Page One, this time about how to write the dreaded synopsis of your novel. My own top tip when it comes to writing a synopsis is that if you have to write multiple versions of different lengths, don't start with a long one and try to edit it down to 1,000 or 500 or even 200 words. That's very, very hard to do and is maddening, because it doesn't feel possible to cut things without making the synopsis meaningless.

Instead, write each synopsis from scratch, to the correct length. It feels like more work, but I absolutely promise you from the bottom of my heart it will save you a lot of pain.

WATCHING: We finished ATOMIC last night and, ironically given the fundamental misunderstanding of how nuclear criticality works at the end, I felt it was a fairly profound fizzle of an ending. They were clearly hoping for a second season judging by the post-finale teaser but it doesn't appear to have been picked up, which is a shame because up to the last half hour it was pretty decent.

READING: More beta reading yesterday, along with finishing off a chapter of THE POWER OF THE DOG. I'm in the final quarter of the latter now. It's building to quite the crescendo.

LINK: An excellent post from the Honest Editor (who is also a novelist) on some of the rejections she's received for her own work. Some deeply familiar phrases in these.

UP NEXT: Back to the outline tomorrow and hopefully I'll pass the 50% mark. It's kind of hard to tell, since I'm writing a summary rather than the actual story. And sometimes I get stuck and need to stare into the distance for a bit until an idea occurs to me. Occasionally there's scribbling in a notebook (something about writing by hand can spark things when typing doesn't). But I'll get there in the end.

Onward!