Daynote - Wed 24 Jun

It's 1°C cooler here today than it was yesterday. I am not in London, which is a massive relief. And there's a sea breeze, which makes the hot-for-Scotland temperatures even more bearable. Nice walk this morning, threw a very small stick for Poppy The Labrador.

I think I'm just about recovered from Capital Crime, with the exhaustion abated by a couple of nights in my own bed. Still a bit of an emotional hangover, because it was such an intense weekend, but that's been true for a solid month or so now with the book release and everything that came along with it. I'll be okay, with a bit of walking and thinking and journalling and talking. Being a writer who largely works from home, I live in my head a lot, but I'm lucky to have a very broad community of amazing family and friends in my life that I can lean on when I need to. As ever, routine and writing will be the foundation that I'll build from.

ON DECK: It was very warm and still overnight, so I didn't sleep great, and got moving very slowly this morning. But I got a reasonable 580 words that got me over the 40k mark on DRIFT too, which felt pretty good. I think that's roughly a third of the way through the book. We'll see.

LISTENING: I enjoyed this CrimeTime FM interview with Mark Billingham on the event of his CWA Diamond Dagger. Mark is a regular at the crime festivals I've been attending the last few years, so I've heard a few anecdotes and stories from him before, but this is a really in-depth interview covering his whole career. Fascinating stuff and I'm always interested in learning how people make a long-term writing career work.

WATCHING: More of WIDOW'S BAY last night. What a brilliant show. The episodic format really pitches up the dread and hilarity simultaneously.

READING: In the final quarter of DECEPTION by Alan Parks (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) and it is accelerating towards quite an ending, I suspect. The wartime noir vibes are off the charts.

LINK: This is a great piece from Abie Longstaff on prioritising writing in a messy life. This was shared in the fantastic Edinburgh SFF Discord server, where we chat about such things a lot.

Speaking of prioritising writing, I'm also lucky enough to have been invited earlier this year to be a guest mentor in another Discord server for debut writers whose books are coming out next year. It's really fun, because I get to chat about my experiences of publishing and writing along with other authors who have a few books out, and answer a lot of the kinds of questions I had myself as a debut. Yesterday we were talking about the experience of your writing (hopefully) getting better from book to book and it reminded me of this post I wrote a couple of years ago about working on a body of work. Having re-read it, I think it's even more true than it was back then.

UP NEXT: Mainly today I am just glad to not be in London. Since I'm not in London I will pop into Edinburgh this evening for Haunted Happenings with Heba Al-Wasity and my friends MK Hardy, which I'm really looking forward to. And on Friday I've got my friend Ben's launch for his book ATOMIC COFFIN (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon), which comes out tomorrow and got an absolute belter of a review in the Scotsman yesterday.

And, somewhere in there, I'm hoping to get another 3k words written, do some exercise, sleep (despite the heat), finish two proofs and fully brace my psyche for the imminent landing of my next set of edits. We'll see how it goes.

Onward!