Daynote - Wed 6 May 2026
Slow moving through the woods, literal and figurative.
Man, I am moving slow at the moment in the mornings. Oof. Still, got out for a walk and breathed some fresh air. I'll call that a win. A nice slow walk among the trees.
ON DECK: Crawled through two chapters this morning and managed to add 127 words when I was meant to be cutting at least 108. But such is the way. There's plenty to cut later on, so I'm fixing continuity and tweaking existing scenes. And I have a couple of scenes to write which will probably add one or two thousand words. It feels very much like walking through the woods too, though less restful as I keep losing sight of the path.
But! Once this big lump of up-front reworking of timeline and continuity is done, I think most of the rest of the book is broadly functional, so I should be able to go through cutting one or two hundred words from each scene and gradually get down to my target word count with a much tighter book. We'll see.
LISTENING: Loved this episode of the Murder Junction podcast with writer and translator Daniel Hahn. Absolutely fascinating discussion of the nuances of translation.
WATCHING: We finished RESIDENT ALIEN last night, a really lovely and uplifting ending. What a great show.
READING: Continuing to be blown away by CHILDREN OF STRIFE by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon), which is getting weird (complimentary) in its final third.
LINK: An excellent profile of Mick Herron in the Observer that I enjoyed a lot.
UP NEXT: I will continue to make slow progress this week, I think, as it's a mix of finicky timeline stuff and writing new scenes, which is a poor mix for overall velocity. But hopefully by the end of the week I'll be able to start speeding up a bit.
Onward!