Daynote - Thu 25 Sep

An early start this morning, jumping off the sleeper from Edinburgh and into a very pleasantly cool London morning. I'm actually in Bristol today during the day, though back to London this evening to catch the sleeper home (and likely sneak in some book signings on my way through). Right now, though, I'm waiting for my train to depart Paddington, so there's time for a quick daynote before I settle down to spend the 90 minute trip to Bristol writing.

ON DECK: Zero words so far, though I normally manage a thousand or so on this particular train journey (Update: a nice 1,146 words, hooray). I'm waiting on some emails about book stuff today, in preparation for... drum roll... the cover reveal for Book 2 tomorrow! It's actually already snuck out on various retailer sites if you're really curious, but tomorrow we'll be doing a bit of the old fanfare and fussmaking on Instagram, Bluesky and here.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I got a great software recommendation from the most recent episode of Scriptnotes, which is the clipboard manager Maccy. It's free and open source, though you can also pay the developer what you want via the website, or £10 via the Mac App Store. I've had it installed for a couple of days and it's fantastic. I've never really jibed with clipboard managers before, but I'm putting in the effort to learn the shortcuts with this one because I do a lot of copying and pasting links for posts like this, as well as moving snippets of text around in my creative work. And this should help eliminate the constant Alt-tabbing back and forth. Plus it has lots of security and privacy friendly settings, like clearing history on quit. One of those great little apps that does one thing and does it exceptionally well.

LISTENING: Really enjoyed this interview with Callum McSorley on In My Good Books. Susie really is lining up some fantastic interviews recently.

WATCHING: We watched the finale of ALIEN: EARTH last night. It's a good series that is pretty uneven, with some odd decisions and pacing in the first few episodes. But I think it's at least on a par with ALIEN: ROMULUS as far as recent ALIEN things go, including having a very high visual/plot/theme/dialogue callback ratio. I still think it was a mistake to show the aliens (plural) quite so much. They were mostly in the shadows as a matter of technical necessity in the earlier films but it gave those films a very specific 'quiet dread' vibe. And at many points the 'person in a suit' or 'obvious CGI' of the current series undermined that pretty comprehensively. Still, good fun. Looking forward to cracking into SLOW HORSES when I get back home this weekend.

READING: Nearly at the end of A KILLER IN PARADISE, which I've brought with me on the train. I suspect I'll finish it tonight. As with his last book, Tom has kept me guessing all the way to the last fifty pages. I have my suspicions though.

KIT: A random one for the gamers - before I set off for the train last night I was gaming and I realised I've never talked about the IEMs (In Ear Monitors) I use for gaming. They're meant for musicians, primarily, but they're cheap, good sound quality and they don't make my ears hot like big gaming headsets do. And the mic on them is good enough for multiplayer. I use Linsoul ones, which are about £25.

LINK: I (mostly) nodded along to this post by Kate McKean about the (very) poorly paid labour of promoting your own book. I suspect some folk will bristle a bit at it and (mostly correctly) counter that authors can't really move the needle on their own, so if the book sales are theoretical, then yes, actually, the work is unpaid. But I tend to think of promo as a microcosm of the larger certainties about publishing. Namely that you can do it and you might (even probably) won't get a book sale/book deal out of the work. But if you don't do it, you definitely won't. It's uncertain reward and terrible day-to-day returns on your time from top to bottom folks. Which is why I always recommend to only do the things you kind of enjoy anyway - life's too short to do stuff you hate for rewards that may take years to accumulate. This post pairs very well with another on The Cycle Of Suck for book promotion, which I also thought was pretty spot-on.

UP NEXT: A day of work in Bristol, then a train back to London with Tom Hindle's book to keep me company, sneaky signings in London, a bit of dinner and then off on the sleeper back to Scotland tonight. Then, tomorrow, cover reveal!

Onward!