Daynote - Wed 21 May

I've never written more than a sentence or two on a typewriter, which I suspect is true for the vast majority of writers under the age of, say, fifty years old. But they remain weirdly prevalent in stock photography collections.

I was up a bit late last night running a Delta Green one shot game with some writer pals. It was a lot of fun. We... uh, contained the incident, so it was technically a success. But I got up late and skipped my walk again as a result. Definitely need to get out tomorrow, I'm getting twitchy.

ON DECK: I was editing from crit partner notes today, hopping around a half dozen chapters. I added a lot and cut a lot, so all that furious effort got me a small visible return, in -20 words cut overall and two scenes set to 'Submission Ready' status in Scrivener. But I made changes across way more chapters than that. And once the crit partner edits are made, I can then go through those chapters fairly swiftly doing my combined integration/polishing/continuity/readability pass, which is also functioning as a final word count reduction pass too. So I'm still on course to finish Part 3 tomorrow and hopefully square away Part 4 by Monday or Tuesday.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: When I'm working from crit partner notes I sometimes feel like I'm not actually doing much, because by their nature they are sporadic comments dotted across thousands of words and several chapters, from multiple people. But once they're done, it really does make the subsequent detailed line edit easier and faster, firstly because my crit partners are amazing and they've spotted a bunch of things that improve the draft and secondly because it's much easier to do the line edits if I'm not jumping back and forth between Scrivener and a bunch of marked up crit documents.

Last week I was experimenting with consolidating crit partner notes before then working through them systematically, but I think I prefer doing them as a separate stage, to be honest. I'll keep trying out different approaches, but I think a crit pass, then detailed line edit is working pretty well.

LISTENING: I loved this episode of Scriptnotes called How Not To Ruin Your First Film. Once again, I think a lot of the things they talk about definitely apply to your first time working with a publisher. People talk a lot about how writing is very solitary, which is true about the actual word-production bit, but really not true about the 'putting the book out' bit. That's very collaborative, and the advice in this podcast is very relevant, I think, even if you're not a film director or scriptwriter.

WATCHING: No TV last night, due to the aforementioned game, but I'm looking forward to THE STUDIO tonight, and probably RACE ACROSS THE WORLD as well.

READING: I'm getting through BELIEVE by S.M. Govett pretty fast, it's a very readable and engrossing crime novel. It's still in the setup phase, plot-wise, but the dual POV is working very well.

LINK: An excellent post from D.V. Bishop on what happens when you get 'orphaned', meaning your editor leaves your publisher. It's incredibly common, so it's good to see it being talked about.

UP NEXT: More crit partner passes, then a push to the end. I'm running ahead of my crit partners and I have more words for them to read than they'll comfortably be able to get through before my deadline, so my current plan is to drop them a full version of the manuscript at the same time as I submit it, then incorporate any notes they may have on the last 20-30k words (which they haven't read yet) when I'm addressing feedback from other parties. But we'll see how we go.

Nine days left on my deadline. Onward!