Daynote - Tue 18 Nov

From gorgeous weather to grey drizzle, such is the way of the Scottish November. And I stayed up too late playing ARC Raiders last night, so I had a lie-in. Cracking game, by the way.

ON DECK: Yesterday afternoon I had a great meeting where one of my recent pitches got the thumbs up. The i's are not yet dotted, but I am continuing with outlining in the hope and relative confidence that they will be. So I added a few more hundred words to my outline this morning and had a good time doing so. Mostly also being glad I wasn't out walking in the sideways drizzle.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: I'm sure there's really good outlining tools out there - I've played around with all kinds of things over the years, like OmniOutliner, Workflowy and even Scrivener itself. But for some reason (mostly because I'm now sending my pitches and outlines off to actual publishers) I've taken to mostly just writing a stream-of-consciousness treatment-style outline directly in Word. A much maligned tool, but it's perfectly fine for knocking out 10-20 page documents. I hate using it to write actual novels though. And the big multi-page story dump is a pretty good way to work out all the big beats of a story at a high level without getting lost in bullets and sub-bullets and so on.

LISTENING: This was a good interview with literary agent Ciara Finan over at the Write and Wrong podcast.

WATCHING: We're continuing with ATOMIC on Now TV, which is tonally interesting - quite dark in some moments but also very fast-paced and at points verging on zany. I do love the Scottish mercenary character played by Stuart Martin, who has some of the best lines in the show.

READING: All over the place yesterday reading-wise - I'm doing three beta-reads, two for friends and one that was an auction prize from Cymera. Very different stories, but a lot to like in all of them.

LINK: I'm intrigued to see (courtesy of the excellent Spybrary newsletter) that Apple TV have acquired another spy thriller following the success of SLOW HORSES. The new show is called SAFE HOUSES and is based on a novel by Dan Fesperman.

UP NEXT: It's going to be a week of outlining and planning and preparing, since it's looking very likely I'll be diving into a new piece of work, hereby codenamed PROJECT VAULT. Very exciting stuff!

Another reminder, too, that I'll be appearing as part of Book Week Scotland at Ibrox Library in Glasgow. I'm on a panel with Neil Broadfoot and Andrew Raymond, chaired by fellow Bloody Scotland Debut Prize shortlister Natalie Jayne Clark. Really looking forward to it.

Onward!