Ooft, back online, sort of, after a rough few days of cold. Yesterday I managed to lie horizontally and half-watch BEN HUR on the iPlayer, which I've never seen, and still, mostly, have not seen, because I slept through half of it. More leprosy than I expected from a film I primarily understood to be about chariots.
Today I'm still coughing a bit but mostly functional. Which is a relief. When you're sick, you sometimes feel like you'll never be well again, even though logically you know that coughs eventually stop and colds eventually fade. Not quite up to resuming walks (or runs) yet, but hopefully in a day or two I will be.
ON DECK: While I was groaning on the sofa my copyedits for Project VAULT came back (and were 'mercifully light' in my editor's words) so I cracked into those this morning, with 38 pages done. Which is exactly 10% of the total! Pleasing.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: One of the first things I do when I get my copyedits is to set up Word to use keyboard shortcuts for 'next change or comment', 'previous change or comment' and 'accept change and move to to next', all of which are 'ribbon' buttons that you can map to the keyboard. It makes things so much faster and easier when you're reviewing hundreds of small changes. For some reason I've never figured out, though, Word always puts the selected change at the very, very bottom of the screen, sometimes half off the screen. If anyone knows how to change that, please let me know.
LISTENING: I greatly enjoyed this Spybrary interview with William Boyd about his Gabriel Dax books. It's not a series I've tried yet, but I've got a hankering for period spy stuff after really enjoying William Cook's THE FIFTEENTH MAN (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) earlier this year, so I think I'll pick up the first one.
WATCHING: A bit more SLOW HORSES in between the comfort movies, over the weekend. It's developing nicely.
READING: A few pages of LONDON STATION by David McCloskey (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) when I wasn't feeling feverish, which is now shifting into a higher gear. Definitely seeing why Tim Shipman rated this book so highly.
LINK: This is a fascinating piece about how book prizes actually work (in terms of the judging and sifting of entries). It seems like an absolutely fearsome amount of reading, that's for sure. Hat-tip to Erin Hardee for the link.
UP NEXT: More copyedits, probably for the rest of this week and into the next. I'm also doing nightly Narrative Damage recordings at the moment (a bunch of us had a run of free evenings so we're getting episodes in the can as fast as possible), so it's very busy. But hopefully I'll get out in the woods tomorrow.
AND - look out for an announcement this week! I'm keeping it under my hat for now, but if you're a fan of anxious Scottish spies, you may want to tune in to my socials, this website and your email inbox if you're a site member.
Onward! With only moderate amounts of coughing!