Daynote - Tue 8 Jul
Starting a new novel.
I keep forgetting to take a picture of my morning walk, so some similar-looking woods from Unsplash will have to do today. It was absolutely gorgeous out though, with a nice light breeze, sunshine, deer in the dappled shadows and ferns up to my shoulder. Lovely.
Last night I also got tagged by the excellent Pause Books who interviewed me for their Off The Shelf Podcast. That episode is available to listen to now!
I've been doing a lot of podcasts recently and it's fun to listen to them now that they're coming out, especially as I'm getting to hear the other shortlisters for the McDermid Debut Award and the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize talk about their own experience. Here's Foday Mannah's episode in the same series, which came out this morning.
ON DECK: I've made a start on PROJECT DRIFT! A light start, but a start nonetheless with 434 words drafted. It feels really good to be writing something wholly new. I will probably have to almost immediately put it down again to handle incoming edits, but I've learned that it's best to maintain some kind of forward momentum so you can take advantage of little gaps and waiting periods. Otherwise half the year can be gone.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: As I noted yesterday I'm starting this book with only a minimal outline and very sketchy worldbuilding. That means I often need to stop dead mid-draft to come up with a name for something or think about how things are supposed to work. So far I haven't resorted to putting 'TK' place holders anywhere (TK is a letter combination that's very uncommon in English words, so you can use it to mark things you need to come back to pretty reliably) but I may do that later if worldbuilding-on-the-fly is slowing me down too much.
This post is also how I just found out that Ghost (the CMS I use to write this blog) has TK placeholders built in! If you put TK into any paragraph in Ghost it leaves a little sidebar bookmark and it warns you if you try to publish the post without removing them. That's a handy and apparently completely undocumented feature.
LISTENING: Absolutely loved the latest episode of Balancing The Books with the author Callum McSorley.
Cailean Steed
Callum won the McIlvanney Prize last year at Bloody Scotland (I was in the room and saw it happen) and we did an event together at the Waterstones in Glasgow Braehead last December, so it was great to hear the story of how he got there. As previously noted, this podcast is well worth your time.
WATCHING: A bit more of THE RESIDENCE last night. It continues to be very twisty, although unfortunately it seems Netflix have already cancelled the second season. I'm sure that makes sense in a spreadsheet somewhere but I've no idea why they keep commissioning these shows and then giving them almost no chance to pick up an audience. The rise of apparently accurate data has been the absolute death of artistic judgement in the creative arts. I say apparently accurate because anyone who's worked in tech knows data is always fragmentary and partial and you can draw entirely the wrong conclusions by misreading it. But it's treated as the source of absolute truth and I think we're losing so much to the perception of logic and rational choices which are just vibes-with-more-steps.
READING: More of THE POWER OF THE DOG yesterday. It's a big old book, so this portion of my daynotes might get a bit repetitive for a while.
LINK: As part of the buildup to the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (which starts in just over a week! yikes!) and my shortlisting for the McDermid Debut Award, I did an interview with the festival team.
As an aside, I've also realised today that Ghost does these neat little link card things, so I'm going to use them for specific link recommendations like this one. I think they look quite nice?
UP NEXT: More drafting! I'm aiming, I think, to hit around 6k for this first week, since I didn't draft yesterday. We'll see how I do against that benchmark. An interview tomorrow, then I believe some more podcast episodes coming out later this week too. It's another busy one.
Onward!