Daynote - Tue 20 Jan

A grey and slightly warmer morning today in the woods and at the beach, with the sky shading into the sea. Poppy The Labrador brought me several excellent sticks. A very nice start to the day.

ON DECK: My intention to edit, draft and outline this morning was... optimistic. The editing didn't take that long, but I then spent a good half hour fighting with Scrivener's Compile settings (as I have to do with every new project, because even if you import a Compile settings file from your last project, it inexplicably doesn't get applied without a bunch of manual fiddling). Very frustrating. I ended up with 12 words in aggregate, but the first 7,000 words or so are now with my crit partners.

LISTENING: Very glad to see Adventures in Publishing Land return for the new year. This time around they talk Traitors, romantasy, AI scams and more. It's such a good show.

WATCHING: Another episode of THE NIGHT MANAGER last night - it's got a lot more kinetic (in a fun way) but the cover has been comprehensively blown. Good to see Olivia Colman back properly though.

READING: Read a bunch of EXCESSION (Bookshop, Amazon) and I'd quite forgotten how adept Banks is at dropping just incredible amounts of mind-blowing worldbuilding basically just as a tiny intro to a specific location. It's so nice when books stand up to a re-read.

LINK: Yesterday I received my first full-year statement from the UK Public Lending Right (PLR). This is an amazing scheme which provides authors, illustrators and narrators with small payments based how many times the books they've worked on are checked out from UK libraries. There's a similar scheme for Ireland and you can sign up for both through the UK PLR website, if you're an author, illustrator or narrator based in the UK.

It's not automatic or retrospective (you need to register, then add each ISBN for each of your books and formats and keep them up to date from year to year) but it is amazing and well worth doing. And as someone who spent half my life in libraries as a kid, it gives me a warm glow to think about people around the UK and Ireland checking out and reading my book.

UP NEXT: Now that this week's editing is done, I'll be back on the drafting tomorrow. I've got enough outlined chapters to get me to Friday, I think.

Onward!