Daynote - Thu 22 Jan

Off in to Edinburgh (well, a large business campus on the edge of Edinburgh, anyway) for a day job thing, so the writing has been peripatetic - on trains and trams and in a coffee shop, briefly. No walk in the woods today, but it's always nice to pop into the city.

This is the 500th post on my website, which is kind of astonishing. Obviously the vast, vast majority of those posts are my daynotes, which I started doing last year, but it's still nice to see a nice round number like that. And the daynotes have become an invaluable record, for me, of what I actually get up to. Especially when I'm putting together monthly newsletters. It's so easy to forget things in the rush of the day-to-day.

ON DECK: 267 words managed in short bursts. There's the slight annoyance of lugging two laptops around, though my writing laptop is fairly light. And I kept the momentum going, which is the important thing. Might write more on the way home. Edit: Got this up to 1,116 words with a bit of lunchtime writing.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I do like to occasionally do work on the hop, so to speak - I did enough work and publishing-related travel last year (with more planned this year) that I think it's important to not get too attached to my nice comfortable office, big monitor and clicky mechanical keyboard as requirements for writing.

In his excellent book DEEP WORK (Bookshop, Amazon), Cal Newport talks about different styles of focused working, including the traditional 'five hours of solid concentration in a silent room' style and what he terms 'journalistic' deep work; the ability to use scraps of time when you're on the move and out in the world to quickly drop into a state of focus and produce a meaningful amount of work. So named because it's an essential skill for journalists reporting on a story, filing copy from out in the field. That suck with me and it's definitely one I've been trying to maintain and cultivate.

LISTENING: I enjoyed this episode of Page One Extra with Abir Mukherjee yesterday. Excellent book choices too. Also available on Youtube.

WATCHING: More of THE TRAITORS last night. I'd say the Traitors are playing a blinder but it's mostly self-inflicted wounds caused by the Faithful flailing about at this point, to be honest.

READING: Read a bunch more of EXCESSION by Iain M. Banks (Bookshop.org, Amazon) last night. It's been a while since I really fell into a book like this. It's nice. Spending time in a (flawed) space utopia has really helped with the general * gestures at everything * of it all.

LINK: I've been following the (excellent) reporting of Ed Zitron for a while and just discovered he has a podcast and is in the middle of a multi-part in-depth breakdown of the economics (or lack thereof) of the AI bubble. Fascinating and terrifying stuff.

UP NEXT: Tomorrow is a Writing Friday and I'm going to power through a bunch of scenes and outline a bunch more. Can't wait!

Onward!