Daynote - Thu 4 Sep

I've never owned a typewriter, though like most people my age there was one in the house when I was growing up and I'd occasionally hammer at its keys. I'm very glad I came of age when word processing was becoming a thing, but also I kind of like the sound they make. And they make good header images for blog posts.

No walk this morning, again, because I'm terrible at going to bed on time. Tomorrow!

ON DECK: Back to the draft on PROJECT DRIFT this morning and a decent 1,021 words added to the draft. My drafting plan has somewhat gone by the board due to the burnout break I took in the first week of August, followed by editing on SOLITARY AGENTS and pitch writing. I think it's still doable to finish a draft this side of Christmas, so I'm leaving my plan in place for now. But we'll see if I can hit the word counts.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I no longer work to rigid word counts, because I find they don't motivate me - instead, my focus (since about 2019) has been on time spent. And I'm a lot happier for it, on a day-to-day level. I also find, regardless of how many long, short or extremely productive/unproductive sessions I have in a given year, my average words-per-hour rate is nearly always about 750 words, across a full year. It is eerily consistent.

That said, I'm a working writer now and I have a) deadlines and b) a lot of books I want to write, so I do kind of need to work out how many words I'm intending to write in a given week, month or year. That's why I use Pacemaker to make drafting plans. Here's the one for PROJECT DRIFT.

I don't call this plan a target. Instead, it's a pace that I'm hoping to keep. The nice thing about Pacemaker as a tool is that it's incredibly flexible and responsive. If you miss a few days, it automatically recalculates your pace. If you want to skip weekends, you can change that in settings. If you want to write twice as much on Fridays, go right ahead.

Once I have these plans, I'm able to somewhat accurately look at the year as a whole and know that I can fit a new novel draft in between edits, proofs, promo and other writing work. Of course, things come in at random times often with short deadlines attached, as you can see by the giant dent in my plan in the screenshot above, when I was working on SOLITARY AGENTS edits. But having a plan and keeping an eye on overall progress really helps, I've found. I'm free of the tyranny of the arbitrary daily word count minimum, but I also can reasonably accurately track how fast I'm going and whether I need to extend my plans.

LISTENING: A two-fer today on the podcasts. I really enjoyed this interview with my friend Lorraine Wilson on the BFS podcast, talking about her (superb) new book THE SALT ORACLE. I also really enjoyed this interview with my friend Dave Wragg on SFFAddicts.

Having writer friends is rad. You're just listening to a podcast and then you're like 'oh, hey, it's my mate!' - it's great.

WATCHING: A bit more ALIEN: EARTH last night. An excellent episode, though I do feel they're over-showing the alien. The power of the original films was how much the aliens were barely glimpsed in the shadows. When you have long shots of the alien standing in a brightly lit room doing that tilted-head alien leer thing that seems to have become a series signature, or just bounding along a corridor, it becomes fairly obvious that it's a guy in a suit.

READING: More of TIME WARPED last night and it's hit a point where the combination of tension and nostalgia is just nuclear-grade evocative.

LINK: I was delighted to see yesterday on John Scalzi's Big Idea feature that the short story writer and novelist Rich Larson (who is one of my favourite short SF writers) has a collection coming out. And it's a typically beautiful and human piece of writing too. Instant order. It's not the first time I've ordered something because I saw it on the Big Idea - I'm very glad John uses his not insubstantial platform to boost other writers in this way.

UP NEXT: More DRIFT editing tomorrow, a pre-Bloody Scotland haircut, family visiting over the weekend and then, gasp, it's Bloody Scotland week. Can't wait!

Onward!