Daynote - Tue 13 May

Overcast today, but a nice walk on the beach. No birds of prey this morning, but a couple of good stick throws for Poppy The Labrador.

ON DECK: Now that I've made a big cut, I'm able to charge forward with my edit, chapter by chapter. However, I'm in a 'flux' period of editing, where I'm not steadily losing words anymore (since I've already lost the bulk of what I need to lose). Instead, I'm cutting, then adding, then cutting, then adding again. Today's net word count was 25 words added, but that was over the course of five or six chapters edited, so the actual words typed and deleted was probably more or less 300-500 each way.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: The other thing I did with my writing time this morning was to use my edit letter method to break down the changes I need to make from my critique partners. I'm lucky enough to be in a very active critique group, so when I submit a batch of chapters, I get a Google Doc with four or five sets of comments (we use the Tabs functionality to keep each person's commentary separate).

I had been trying to just edit straight off the Google Docs, keeping them open on my second monitor, but when two or three people point out the same issue, it's a little awkward to jump around between tabs and triple check. So instead I'm breaking everything down into Things, de-duplicating the feedback and doing the little typo fixes as I go. That gets me a single consolidated list to work from and makes sure I haven't missed anything.

LISTENING: I love the deep-dive mini series that the Le Carré Cast does about specific books, and their latest, on A LEGACY OF SPIES, is excellent.

WATCHING: More THE HANDMAID'S TALE last night. Essentially a positioning episode, moving everyone gently into place for what's coming next. But some excellent character work in the process.

READING: More of INNOCENT GUILT yesterday. I'm about halfway through and it has subverted my expectations twice already.

LINK: Jordan Acosta has another excellent batch of free image resources for bloggers and newsletter writers.

UP NEXT: More flux editing. Up a little, down a little, chapter by chapter until I get to the end. If I can hover around the 100k mark the whole time and get what I need to get into the draft, I'll be happy. A little over 2.5 weeks remaining until this book is due, and I'm on course and feeling good about it.

Onward!