Daynote - Wed 14 Jan

An absolutely gorgeous start to the morning, with the sky turning orange and red over the woods and birds flocking through the glow. A very pleasant start to the day, and Poppy The Labrador said a tail-wagging hello to boot.

ON DECK: Another decent day, with 1,171 words down, across two different scenes. And the outlining work that I did last Friday has really helped. The book is starting to coalesce at the high level in my head in a very encouraging way and I'm really enjoying both working with established characters and finding the voice for new ones.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: A word on micro-outlining - this year I've gone part-time at my day job (blog posts brewing on that topic) and I now work one day a week fully on writing. What I'm finding is that the extra time on Fridays (so far, I'm only on my second week) is not primarily useful for extra drafting time - mostly I'm foreseeing using to corral all the momentum-stopping task switching writing tasks that previously slowed me down.

So each Friday I'm planning to micro-outline all the scenes for the coming week or so, which involves creating the scenes in Scrivener, ordering them, adding POV and timeline metadata, then doing a beat-by-beat bullet point outline for the scene in the Scrivener document notes.

This was previously something I had to do on the fly at the start of each writing session (so I lost drafting time) or evenings/weekends. Being able to do it consistently each week is going to be a huge help.

LISTENING: I'm a big fan of Arthur Snell's 'Behind The Lines' podcast and this latest episode with Charlie Gammell on the Iran protests is an excellent overview of a fast-moving situation.

WATCHING: I watched A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE on Netflix yesterday and found it a pretty compelling watch. It reminded me quite a lot of that episode of the show PARADISE (if you've seen it, you'll know which one), though the ending pointedly refuses to answer the questions that the entire film spends setting up. I can understand why they did that, but it does tend to prompt a 'wait, is that it?' response. Still, excellent if you really need to raise your blood pressure.

READING: More of EXCESSION by Iain M. Banks (Bookshop.org, Amazon) last night. I'd forgotten just how many plot threads it starts spinning out even in the first hundred pages, but the prose is just as good as I remember. Always a relief when a beloved book turns out to hold up later in life.

LINK: The Honest Editor takes a great look at the eternal question - what exactly is 'the midlist'?

UP NEXT: Just trucking along, getting this whole year started. I was aiming for 25k on the current draft this week, but I think I'll be a bit under that. Still, I'm several thousand words ahead of my Pacemaker plan, so it's all good.

I'm also starting to get excited about heading to Stockport in a couple of weeks for Stockport Noir. I'm appearing in the afternoon, alongside Ruth Ware, Abigail Dean and Sam Holland, moderated by Kelly Peck. We're talking about psychological vs action thrillers. Can't wait!

Onward!