Daynote - Tue 26 Nov

No howling wind this morning, but a grey, cool November morning. No deer in the woods today, but some very friendly labradors (and their owners) at the beach.

Really chuffed this morning to see that my 'Decades' post on Grab This Book is now live. Gordon asked me to contribute to his 'Decades' series, picking five books from five consecutive decades that have influenced or are otherwise important to me. I've gone for a mix of spy thrillers and SF novels, all of which were incredibly formative for me over the years.

ON DECK: A very pleasing email yesterday that I can't talk about yet, but suffice to say A RELUCTANT SPY is continuing to find its way to new readers in new places and that's a very cool thing indeed.

Continuing edits on PROJECT SHARD this morning, working my way slowly through my edit list and adding some stuff. I also did some cutting and got -59 words in aggregate.

It's weird - I did a big edit of this book in the summer and felt like it had been reasonably tightly edited. But today I wanted to get a particular scene under 2k, while also adding some new dialogue, so I went through and looked for places to tighten it up and found loads. Books truly never are really finished, just abandoned. There's always something you can change.

TOOLS: The new phone is doing well - I always forget when you first get a new iPhone it has super variable battery life for the first few days as it downloads updates and re-indexes and calibrates itself. But now it's handily doing a full day out in town and losing maybe 15-20% battery with moderately heavy use. It's super nice not to have to nurse my phone along with a battery pack all day.

LISTENING: I recently discovered The Conversation with Nadine Matheson, who I saw on stage at Harrogate this year. It's a great show. I really enjoyed the episodes with Tim Glister (who I also met this year) and Heather J Fitt. So much so that I messaged Nadine to ask if I could appear on the show and should hopefully be on an episode early next year! Nadine is a fantastic interviewer, and I'm really looking forward to it.

WATCHING: We continued our watch of the new WOLF HALL series last night. Things are getting pretty dramatic. I'm hardly the first person to observe this, but Mark Rylance is an absolutely phenomenal actor.

READING: Wee bit more of JUSTICE OF KINGS last night. I'm not sure how Richard managed to make an in-world explanation of shipping insurance absolutely riveting, but he did.

LINK: I'm an absolute sucker for data-based historical stuff, and this historical journey planner from Cambridge University is brilliant. TL;DR, it took a looooong time to get anywhere in the past. See also ORBIS from Stanford, which geospatially maps the Roman Empire in travel times.

UP NEXT: Trying not to think about Decisions Possibly Being Made elsewhere today, so I'll put the head down for the rest of the week and try my best to get through these edits. Also, this evening I have my first ever transatlantic radio station recording, with WESU from Connecticut. It's not going out live (thank goodness) but it's still a very exciting milestone.