Daynote - Wed 11 Mar 2026
Halfway through another week.
Sunshine and hail this morning, in about equal measure. Ah, March. Never change. I wasn't out in the hail, as I'm still off my feet. But I'm healing up a bit now and hobbling a bit less. Not enough to go for a walk, but hopefully next week.
ON DECK: A decent 1,148 words this morning on Project VAULT, writing a fairly fast-moving action scene. It was a lot of fun. Some things went boom in various exciting ways. The best part of writing action scenes (in both SF and thrillers) is that I have an unlimited special effects budget.
LISTENING: Emma Newman and Adrian Tchaikovsky's excellent podcast Starship Alexandria is back and their first episode this season is looking at Alfred Bester's THE DEMOLISHED MAN. A brilliant and in-depth podcast for SFF fans.
WATCHING: More of SMALL PROPHETS last night (only one episode left, we've flown through it). It's so good. Fantastic script. And Mackenzie Crook's manager character is brilliant.
READING: The plot has properly kicked off in THE INFINITE STATE by Richard Swan (Bookshop.org, Waterstones, Amazon), and I'm very much enjoying it. I can tell, though, that Richard has played a lot of Stellaris, especially in one scene involving the auctioning of a planet. Great fun.
LINK: I sent an extremely irritated email to Grammarly after reading this article The Verge on their unconscionable, unauthorised, uncompensated use of (both living and dead) author's names, likenesses and creative works to power yet another bullshit feature nobody asked for. If you're a working author, you can and should opt out too. This shit makes me absolutely furious.
UP NEXT: Watching the news from LBF, writing some more words, playing a lot of CAIRN with my foot elevated and watching hailstones hit the window. Just another spring week in Scotland.
Onward!