Daynote - Wed 11 Jun

It was a beautiful morning today, but I didn't get out - late to bed after a podcast interview and general farting about, writing packing lists and getting excited for my trips to Stirling and London this week.

ON DECK: 406 words on the PROJECT DRIFT outline this morning. It's a bit chaotic still. I started writing a detailed treatment, got a bit bogged down, then re-started writing a bullet-point outline, but that also got bogged down in detail, so I've pulled back a bunch and I'm writing the big overall plot beats at a much higher level just to get the whole thing out of my head and into some kind of semi-linear structure.

Once I've got that I can reorganise and rethink and start fleshing it out in more detail. But the last third of the book is a big fuzzy mess still and I've no idea where it's going. Zooming out helps with that a lot. Otherwise I just get lost in the weeds.

LISTENING: Absolutely loved this episode of Scriptnotes about living and writing in sci-fi times - how do you write meaningful future-facing fiction in a world with gene editing, chatbots and lab-grown meat?

WATCHING: Really enjoyed this group interview with the cast of Andor at the Paley Center for Media in LA.

READING: More of THE HIROSHIMA MEN. It's one of those books where the tension in reading comes not from wondering how it's going to end, but knowing exactly how it's going to end and seeing the step-by-step analysis of why.

LINK: Anyone who's met me in person will know it's probably about ten minutes or so of small talk before I start talking about how much I bloody love sleeper trains (I travel regularly for work via sleeper trains and I love using them when travelling further afield) so I was very excited to see this concept for an affordable private room/workspace sleeper train from a new company called Nox.

I really hope they can make it work, because I think sleepers are an amazing way to get around but there's lots of ways they could be improved radically to make them a great alternative to cheap flights, not least the price.

UP NEXT: The rest of this week is going to be on the peripatetic side when it comes to writing - train to Stirling tomorrow for the Bloody Scotland launch, then down to London, two days there for Capital Crime then back on the train again and up to Scotland. I'll take what I can get, writing-wise, in that time, but I'm also trying to finish reading a book and square away some business admin, so we'll see how it goes.

Onward!