Daynote - Tue 19 Aug
Good news and misty mornings.
Back out to the woods today, for the first time in a while. I'm making good progress on the edit and I'm on track, so I have eased off the accelerator a bit and got outside, which was lovely. All of a sudden it feels very autumnal - everything cloaked in soft mist, geese flying overhead, the temperature dropping into the low teens. I even wore a jacket today!
Yesterday the secret good news became concrete and I'm very excited. No idea when I'll be able to talk about it, but suffice to say it's something I've wanted for a very long time.
ON DECK: A normal length session this morning, so I got -314 words cut over about 30 or 40 pages. It never ceases to amaze me how I can keep finding new line edits even after I've read through a novel three, four or five times (or more!). There's always something you've missed.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: This is the part of the editing I love the most, just tightening and tweaking and cutting. You can see the scenes getting clearer and easier to read as you go and it's very, very satisfying. There's an awful lot of red on the manuscript, but it's all red I'm creating myself by chopping out words and adding new tiny snippets in.
LISTENING: Absolutely loved this episode of Always Take Notes with novelist and children's book writer Jacqueline Wilson. What a life she's had.
WATCHING: We watched a bit more of DEPT. Q last night. It's a great watch, although the odd Americanism in the dialogue (one of the scriptwriters is Scott Frank) really throws me out. It's impressively few though. Most of the time, most of the cast sound like Scots, in Scotland, speaking normally.
READING: A bit more BERLIN WOLVES on my lunchbreak yesterday. Just got to a fairly dramatic point in the story. Quite the escalation.
LINK: I really enjoyed this discussion with Annalee Newitz on the SFFAddicts podcast about interfaces in SFF - in my day job I design interfaces for a living, so I'm always interested when the topic intersects with my creative work, like on the excellent HUDS + GUIs website. Newitz takes a broader view of the term 'interface' though, and it's a fascinating episode.
UP NEXT: Forging ahead with the edit towards a Friday off. At my current pace I think I should finish somewhere around the middle of next week? We'll see how I go and how it feels, but I'm optimistic.
Onward!