Daynote - Tue 17 Mar 2026

A very happy St Patrick's Day! It was a lovely morning in the woods today, and a good deal warmer than yesterday. I could feel the sun on my face and it felt great. It was windy down at the beach, but not too cold. Lovely. It is doing me a great deal of good to be out of the house again.

ON DECK: Another double-project day, again on VAULT and my short story. 1,095 words on VAULT and 316 words on the short, for a total of 1,411. Not bad. I did struggle slightly to work on both in the time I had available, but that was a focus and timing problem rather than a fundamental capacity issue (spent a bit of time faffing at the start of the writing session, basically). I don't think I could do this as a matter of routine, but it's working fine for this short period.

LISTENING: Loved this Always Take Notes interview with Doug Naylor (co-creator of RED DWARF and now novelist) - really fascinating insight into how the show got made and what the longer arc of a creative career can look like.

WATCHING: More of TRUE DETECTIVE last night. Fantastic stuff. I appreciate this take is twelve years late, but better late than never.

I also really enjoyed this interview with Dominic Sandbrook about his new podcast 'The Book Club' and the apparent decline in reading for pleasure. Thoughtful stuff:

READING: Read a bunch of THE INFINITE STATE by Richard Swan (Bookshop.org, Waterstones, Amazon) yesterday and hit several excellent lines - still some bleak stuff, but some glimmers of hope and even a proper belly laugh at one point.

LINK: I really loved this piece about the MacBook Neo by Sam Henri Gold, reacting to the common refrain that 'this is not the computer for you' in tech power user reviews. He's absolutely right that you use what you have, when it comes to doing something creative with hardware. And I suspect this device will give a lot of people semi-affordable access to significant and reliable computing power, with very interesting results.

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