Daynote - Thu 28 Nov

A very happy Thanksgiving to my American family, friends and readers. Hope you have a lovely day. I'm married to an American, so we also celebrate it, despite living in Scotland. So we'll be tucking into the turkey later as well. Sadly no day off for me though.

A very hard frost this morning too - the end of the year and winter proper is fast approaching and you can really feel it in the air.

ON DECK: Onward with SHARD edits this morning. I was doing a slightly frustrating thing this morning, which was essentially putting a scene in the book back to the way it was three or four edits ago. This was a scene that one of my critique partners suggested needed to be heavily cut for length. I wasn't sure, so I saved a snapshot in Scrivener of the scene before making the edits. At the end of the edit, I thought 'yeah, this works'. It then went through a further two rounds of editing, with lots of little nips and cuts. But now I have opposing feedback that says this scene should be longer and feature more of the stuff I cut.

Fundamentally, you can't implement everyone's feedback, all of the time. You'll end up with a beige, flavourless, collapsed flan of a story. Or the story equivalent of 'The Homer', that may look... interesting but absolutely doesn't work narratively.

In this case, I wasn't sure about the original feedback, but I agree with the new feedback. So I'm trying to decide - do I take the scene as written and rework it? Or do I revert to the snapshotted version from last year, then edit that. The latter feels like less work, but I'd also have to re-do over a year's worth of accumulated line edits. And reverting a whole scene feels like it risks reintroducing crap stuff I definitely should cut.

Anyway, this is how you edit for an hour and get a word count of -6 words. Writing! It's fun, I promise!

TOOLS: I do a tonne of random little screenshots and things, both for this blog and social media, and I've heard Cleanshot X get recommended a bunch of times, particularly on the Youtube channel A Better Computer. In his most recent video, Matt mentioned it was on a Black Friday discount, so I picked it up. And it's great. Here's a slightly over-the-top screenshot of this paragraph in the Ghost editor, using a bunch of the annotation/blurring/highlighting tools.

Blurring, vignetting, adding backgrounds, adding device frames - it's pretty great. And it's my favourite software business model - a decent price for a year of updates, then you can keep using it or pay again if you think new features are worth it for you. Win win.

LISTENING: I'm a big fan of the novelist (and former CIA analyst) David McCloskey, so I was happy to see he was joining the Goalhanger stable of podcasts (Rest is History, Rest is Entertainment, Rest is Politics etc) along with the journalist Gordon Corera to host a new show called The Rest is Classified. The first couple of episodes dropped this week and they are excellent, taking a look at the CIA-sponsored coup in Iran in 1951. As is usual with real-world spy stuff, it makes anything I could come up with in a novel look positively tame.

WATCHING: We caught up with BAKE OFF (chuffed Georgie won) last night and then the last episode of THE FRANCHISE, which I'm still really enjoying. It ended on somewhat of a cliffhanger. I do hope they'll get to make another series, it feels like franchise movie-making is still a target-rich environment when it comes to making a comedy show.

READING: Went to bed very late for no particular reason, but managed to squeeze in a couple of pages of JUSTICE OF KINGS earlier in the day. I don't know why itinerant magical combat lawyers are so compelling, but they really are.

LINK: Really enjoyed this profile of Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot series among others, on Wired.

UP NEXT: I think I'm going to abandon my plan to do a series of surgical strikes on my manuscript and just default to the old 'snowplough' method of doing a front-to-back re-read with my edit list close at hand for reference. I'm almost certain there's a way to make non-linear manuscript editing work for me, but I increasingly find my edit list isn't really a set of tasks I can carry out one after the other, it's a reference list for the somewhat mechanical process of just rewriting the whole book, one chapter at a time. And the big benefit of that kind of editing is that when you get to the end, you're done. Right, on we go.