Daynote - Tue 30 Sep
Oh hey, the month is done.
Most of the time, my phone is a 'good enough' camera for me. But what it really isn't good at is long-distance shots. Still, I managed to get a nice (if grainy) shot of this heron chilling out on the foreshore this morning.
ON DECK: No word count this morning as my copyedits for SOLITARY AGENTS landed last night. They're fairly light, but there's still an awful lot of commas and little consistency changes to check and approve. So, for now, I've paused work on DRIFT and I'm working my way through those. It's pleasingly systematic work and I'm enjoying it.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: One thing that I do that makes copyedits a LOT easier is to create keyboard shortcuts in Word for 'accept and move to next', 'move to next' and 'move to previous'. This lets me fly through the smaller changes without having to laboriously select all the little 'tracked change' lines in Word, which are very, very easy to miss. Highly recommended if have to do copyedits, or even just manage a lot of track changes with your editor.
LISTENING: Loved this episode of In My Good Books with Holly Seddon - her new thriller 59 MINUTES sounds amazing.
WATCHING: We finished off HOSTAGE on Netflix last night. Good stuff, with a good build-up to the finale. But it did, overall, feel a bit flat to me. It had all the ingredients, but didn't quite gel.
READING: Bit more POWER OF THE DOG last night. It's a lot of fun to read something with such a distinctive narrative voice.
LINK: A sobering piece (presaging a forthcoming book) on the AI bubble from Cory Doctorow. I can't help but feel like those guys in the Big Short, feeling like I'm going mad that the truth of this isn't incredibly obvious to everyone, hoping for this stupid, unsustainable bubble to burst, but also dreading the real-world consequences.
UP NEXT: Copyedits! Probably for the next couple of days at least. I've also got podcast interviews tonight and on Thursday, which I'll need to prep for. But otherwise it's just Accept Change over and over again. I love copyedits though, always fun seeing how many errors of fact, language, grammar and continuity my copyeditor has saved me from. She's a gem.
Onwards!